Young Petrella (22 page)

“This is the third hold-up in a fortnight. The third that’s been reported to us. All with guns – or what looked like guns. Now we’ve caught one of them. We’ve
got
to get the names of the other boys out of him. For their sake as much as anything. Before someone really gets hurt.”

“I expect the boy’ll talk,” said Petrella.

Haxtell nodded. Given time, boys usually talked.

But Christopher Connolly was an exception. For he said nothing, and continued to say nothing.

The next thing that happened, happened to old Mrs. Lightly, who lived alone in a tiny cottage above the waterworks. Her husband had been caretaker, and she had retained the cottage by grace of the management, as long as she paid the rent of ten shillings a week. Lately she had been getting irregular in her payments, and she was now under notice to quit.

The evening after the capture of Connolly, just after dark, she heard a noise down in her front hall. She was a spirited old lady, and she came right out, carrying a candle to see what it was all about.

On the patched linoleum lay a fat envelope. Mrs. Lightly picked it up gingerly and carried it back to the sitting room. She got very few letters, and, in any case, the last post had come and gone many hours earlier.

On the envelope, in pencilled capital letters, were the words:

EIGHT WEEKS RENT FROM SOME FRIENDS.

Mrs. Lightly set the candle down on the table, and with fingers that trembled tore open the flap. A little wad of notes slid out. She counted them. Two pound notes and four ten-shilling notes. There was no shadow of doubt about it. It was four pounds. And that was eight weeks’ rent.

Or, looked at in another way, suppose it was seven weeks’ rent. That would have the advantage of leaving ten shillings over for a little celebration. The whole thing was clearly a miracle; and miracles are things which the devout are commanded to commemorate. Mrs. Lightly placed the notes in the big black bag, folded the envelope carefully away behind a china dog on the mantelshelf, and got her best black hat out of the cupboard.

On the same evening, shortly after Mrs. Lightly left her cottage, four boys were sitting in the basement changing room of the old sports pavilion. A storm lantern, standing on a locker, shed a circle of clear white light around it, leaving the serious faces of the boys in shadow. The windows were covered on the inside with cardboard and brown paper.

“I don’t like it, Rob,” the black-haired boy was saying. He was evidently repeating an old argument.

“What’s wrong with it?” said the tall boy. He had a curiously gentle voice.

“Old Cator’s what’s wrong with it. He’s a holy terror.”

“He’s a crook,” said the fat boy.

The small boy said nothing. His eyes turned from one to the other as they spoke, but when no one was speaking they rested on the tall boy, full of trust and love.

“Isn’t it crooks we’re out to fix?” said the tall boy. “Isn’t that right, Busty?”

“That’s right,” said the fat boy.

The black-haired boy said, “Hell, yes. But not just any crooks. Cator’s got a night-watchman. And he’s a tough, too. As likely as not, they both carry guns.”

The tall boy said, “Are you afraid?”

“Of course I’m not afraid.”

“Then what are we arguing about? There’s four of us. And we’ve got two guns. There’s two of them. When we pull the job, maybe only one’ll be there. This is something we’ve
got
to do. We need the money.”

“Another thing,” said the black-haired boy. “Suppose we don’t give quite so much away this time.”

“You mean, keep some for ourselves?”

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“I could think of ways to use it,” said the black-haired boy, with a laugh. He looked round, but neither of the others had laughed with him. “All right,” he said. “All right. I know the rules. Let’s get this planned out.”

“This is how it is, then,” said the tall boy. “I reckon we’ll have to wait about a week. . .” He demonstrated, on sheets of paper, with a pencil, and the four heads came close together, casting long shadows in the lamplight.

Next morning Petrella reported to Chief Inspector Haxtell the minor events of the night. There was a complaint from the railway that some boys had broken a hole in the fence below the sports pavilion.

“Apart from that,” said Petrella, “a beautiful calm seems to have fallen on Highside. Oh – apart from Mrs. Lightly.”

“Mrs. Lightly?”

“Old Lightly’s widow. The one who lives in the cottage next to the waterworks.”

“Was that the one there was a bit in the papers about how she couldn’t pay her rent?”

“That’s right,” said Petrella. “Only she got hold of some money, and that’s what the drinking was about. It was a celebration. She seems to have drunk her way steadily along the High Street. Mostly gin, but a certain amount of stout to help it down. She finished by busting a shop window with an empty bottle.”

“Where’d she got the money from?”

“That’s the odd thing. She was flat broke. Faced with eviction, and no one very sympathetic, because they knew that as soon as she got any money she’d drink it up. Then an angel dropped in, with four quid in an envelope.”

“An angel?”

“That’s what she says. A disembodied spirit. It popped an envelope through the letterbox with four ten-shilling notes and two pounds in it.”

“How much of it was left when you picked her up?”

“About two pounds ten,” said Petrella.

“I don’t see anything odd in all that,” said Haxtell. “Some crackpot reads in the papers that the old girl’s short of money and how her landlord’s persecuting her, and he makes her an anonymous donation, which she promptly spends on getting plastered.”

“Yes, sir,” said Petrella. He added gently, “I’ve seen the notes she
didn’t
spend. They’re all marked on the back with a C in indelible pencil.”

“They’re
what
?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“It’s mad.”

“It’s a bit odd, certainly,” said Petrella. Something, a note almost of smugness in his voice, made the Superintendent look up. “Have you got some line on this?”

“I think I might be able to trace those notes back to the boy who’s been running this show.”

“Then don’t waste any time talking about it,” said Haxtell. “We need results, and we need ’em quickly. We’ve got to get some results.” He added, with apparent inconsequence, “I’m seeing Barstow this afternoon.”

Petrella’s hopes, such as they were, derived from the envelope, which he had duly recovered from behind the china dog on Mrs. Lightly’s mantelshelf. The name and address had been cut out, but two valuable pieces of information had been left behind. The first was the name Strangeway’s printed in the top left-hand corner. The second was the postmark, the date on which was still legible.

Petrella knew Strangeway’s. It was a shop that sold cameras and photographic equipment, and he guessed that its daily output of letters would not be large. There was a chance, of course, that the envelope had been picked up casually. But equally, there was a chance that it had not.

Happily, the manager of Strangeway’s was a methodical man. He consulted his daybook, and produced for Petrella a list of names and addresses. “I think,” he said, “that those would be all the firm’s letters that went out that day. They would be bills or receipts. I may have written one or two private letters, but I’d have no record of them.”

“But they wouldn’t be in your firm’s envelopes.”

“They might be. If they went to suppliers.”

“I’ll try these first,” said Petrella.

There were a couple of dozen names on the list. Most of the addresses were in Highside or Helenwood.

It was no use inventing any very elaborate story. He was too well known locally to pretend to be an insurance salesman. He decided on a simple lie.

To the grey-haired old lady who opened the door to him at the first address he said, “We’re checking the election register. The lists are getting out of date. Have you any children in the house who might come of age in the next five years?”

“There’s Jimmy,” said the woman.

“Who’s Jimmy?”

She explained about Jimmy. He was a real terror. Aged about nineteen. Just as Petrella was getting interested in Jimmy she added that he’d been in Canada for a year.

Petrella took down copious details about Jimmy. It all took time, but if you were going to deal in lies, it was as well to act them out.

That was the beginning of a long day’s work. Early in the evening he came to No. 11 Parham Crescent. The house was no different from a million others of the brick boxes that encrust the surface of London’s northern heights.

The door was opened by a gentleman in shirtsleeves, who agreed that his name was Brazier and admitted to the possession of a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old boy called Robert.

“Robert Brazier?”

“Robert Humphreys. He’s my sister’s son. She’s been dead two years. He lives here –
when
he’s home.”

Petrella picked up the lead with the skill of long experience. Was Robert often away from home?

Mr. Brazier obliged with a discourse on modern youth. Boys nowadays, Petrella gathered, were very unlike what boys used to be when he – Mr. Brazier – had been young. They lacked reverence for their elders, thought they knew all the answers, and preferred to go their own ways. “Sometimes I don’t see him all day. Sometimes two days running. He could be out all night for all I know. It’s not right – Mr. – um. . .”

Petrella agreed that it wasn’t right. Mr. Brazier suffered from such acute halitosis that listening to him was an ordeal. However, he elicited some details. One of them was the name of the South London school that Robert had left eighteen months before.

Petrella did some telephoning, and the following morning he caught a bus and trundled down to Southwark to have a word with Mr. Wetherall, the headmaster of the South Borough Secondary School for Boys. Mr. Wetherall was a small, spare man with a beaky nose and he had been wrestling for quarter of a century with the tough precocious youths who live south of the river. The history of his struggles was grooved into his leathery face. He cheerfully took time off to consider Petrella’s problems; all the more so when he discovered what was wanted.

“Robert Humphreys,” he said. “I had a bet with my wife that I’d hear that name before long.”

“Now you’ve won it, sir.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wetherall. He gazed reflectively round his tiny, overcrowded study, then said, “This is a big school, you know. And I’ve been here, with one short break, for more than ten years. Two or three complete generations – maybe two thousand boys. And out of all that two thousand I could count on the fingers of one hand – without using the thumb – the ones who I’d call natural leaders. And of those few I’m not sure I wouldn’t put Robert Humphreys first.”

Mr. Wetherall added, “I’ll tell you a story about him. While he was here, we were planning to convert a building into a gymnasium. I’d got all the governors on my side except the chairman, Colonel Bond. He was opposed to spending the money, and until I’d won him over, I couldn’t move. One day the Colonel disappeared. He’s a bachelor who spends most of his time at his club. No one was unduly worried. He missed a couple of governors’ meetings, which was unusual. Then I got a letter. From the Colonel. It simply said that he had been thinking things over, and had decided that we ought to go ahead with our gym. He himself wouldn’t be able to attend meetings for some time, as his health had given way.”

Petrella goggled at him. “Are you telling me—?” he said.

“That’s right,” said Mr. Wetherall calmly. “The boys had kidnapped him. Robert organised the whole thing. They picked him up in a lorry, and kept him in a loft, over an old stable. Guarded him, fed him, looked after him. And when they’d induced him to write that letter, they let him out.”

“How did they disguise themselves?”

“They made no attempt to disguise themselves. They calculated, and rightly, that if the Colonel made a fuss people would never stop laughing at him. The Colonel had worked the sum out too, and got the same answer. He never said a word about it. In fact, it was Humphreys who told me. It was then I made my confident prediction. Downing Street or the Old Bailey.”

“I’m afraid it may be the Old Bailey,” said Petrella, unhappily.

“It was an even chance,” said Mr. Wetherall. “He was devoted to his mother. If she hadn’t died, I believe there’s hardly any limit to what he might have done. He’s with an uncle now. Not a very attractive man.”

“I’ve met him,” said Petrella. As he was going he said, “Did you get your gym?”

“I’ll show you it as we go,” said Mr. Wetherall. “One of the finest in South London.”

It took another whole day for Petrella to finish his enquiries, but now that the clue was in his hand, it was not difficult to find the heart of the maze. It had been a day of blazing heat; by nine o’clock that night when he faced Haxtell, hardly a breath was moving.

“There are four of them,” he said. “Five with Chris Connolly, the one we caught. First, there’s a boy called Robert Humphreys. His first lieutenant’s Brian Baker, known as Busty.”

“A fat boy,” said Haxtell. “Rather a good footballer. His father’s a pro.”

“Correct. The third one is Les Miller.”

“Sergeant Miller’s boy?”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

The two men looked at each other.

“Go on,” said Haxtell grimly.

“The fourth, and much the youngest, is one of the Harrington boys. The one they call Winkle. His real name’s Eric, or Ricky. There seems to be no doubt that the air-guns they’ve been using were stolen from a shop in Southwark, which is, incidentally, where Humphreys went to school.”

“And Humphreys is the leader?”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that at all, sir. In fact, the whole thing is a rather elaborate game made up by him.”

“A game,” said Haxtell, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“Of Robin Hood. That’s why they used those names. Fat Brian was Friar Tuck, red-headed Chris was Will Scarlet, Les was the Miller’s son. And Ricky was Allen-a-Dale. Robert, of course, was Robin. I believe that historically—”