The giant truck and trailer had been unloaded from the Channel ferry at Dover in the late afternoon and had come to London through Canterbury and the Medway towns. It was evidently following a route which had been marked out for it and was now stationary, halfway across the open top of Blackheath whilst Fred, the co-driver, tried to read a map by the dim light on the dashboard.
He said, “Right at that next roundabout, Charlie. Left again when you get to the bottom.”
They ran down Maze Hill, swung left past the Royal Greenwich Hospital and right again, towards the river.
“If you ask me,” said Fred, “this is bloody daft. Why didn’t we go straight across the Heath? New Cross—Old Kent Road—New Kent Road. Straight into town. Left here, Charlie.”
“Must be some reason for it, I suppose,” said Charlie philosophically. “Do what you’re told and don’t ask questions. That’s my motto.” He was handling the monster with the light firmness of a man who has driven heavy-goods vehicles all his working life. “Less traffic this way, perhaps.”
“Not much traffic anywhere.”
The evening had closed in, and an early autumn mist was drifting up from the river. The yellow Continental-type headlights were a help, but they had to drive quite slowly.
“Right here,” said Fred, “and left again at the end. Should bring us out into Tooley Street.”
They were crawling along a completely empty stretch of road, bounded on both sides by shuttered warehouses. The overhead neon lamps shone through the mist with a bluish tinge.
“Turning coming up,” said Fred. “Just round the next bend.” And then, in a sharper voice, “Bloody hell! Watch it!”
Charlie’s reactions had been fast. He had crammed on the powerful vacuum brakes.
A van was parked, just round the bend, broadside on, blocking the road. The giant truck juddered to a halt with its nose inches from its flank. The next moment the road was full of men. The doors of the cab were wrenched open. Fred, who resisted, got a punch in the stomach which sent him crowing and whistling into the gutter. Charlie, still being philosophical, was sitting on the pavement with a man standing over him with a pick helve.
Around them, matters were proceeding in silence, without undue haste but with no waste of time. The padlocks on the doors of truck and trailer were cut with metal shears, and men became busy in both. Bales of paper were thrown out into the road. Other men cut the cords round the bales, stripped open the cardboard coverings and started to throw the contents into a great pile in the middle of the road.
Charlie watched, fascinated, as the pile grew. Other men were busy with jerricans of petrol, sousing the paper.
“Bloody Guy Fawkes won’t be bloody in it when that lot goes up,” said the man behind Charlie. “Better be moving back a bit, I suggest.”
“Good idea,” said Charlie. He shuffled farther along the pavement. Fred, who had got his breath back, crawled after him.
A second van had drawn up behind the truck, blocking the way back. It had a blue police sign on it. A car, coming up from behind, had been stopped, and at the corner a motorcyclist in police uniform was advising the driver to back.
“Lorry on fire round that bend. May go up any moment.”
The car went hurriedly into reverse.
The truck and trailer were both empty by now. Someone tossed a bundle of lighted rags on to the pile and backed away quickly as the whole mass exploded in white flame.
Two minutes later the street was empty of everyone except Charlie and Fred, who sat with their backs to the wall, twenty yards down the road, looking at the bonfire.
“Better find a telephone, I suppose,” said Charlie.
“Bloody nerve,” said Fred.
Detective Chief Superintendent Morrissey, the big, white-faced Jew who had three times won the Police Heavyweight Boxing Championship and now headed the six Metropolitan Special Crime Squads, said the same thing to Detective Sergeant Brannigan.
Brannigan said, “Someone spotted the fire and put in an emergency call. By the time the first car got there everyone had gone except the truck drivers and this one young tearabout who’d been left on watch at the far end of the road, wearing, can you beat it, a police macintosh and motorcycle helmet. Turning motorists away. He tried to turn the squad car away.” Brannigan gave a laugh. “That didn’t go down big. They pulled him in. Boy called Colt.”
“Any form?”
“He hasn’t had time to collect much form. He’s only sixteen.”
“Get anything out of him?”
“Not to start with. Then someone got the bright idea of letting it slip out that his mates had left him behind on purpose. Got a grudge against him. Something about his girlfriend. He fell for that and started to talk. Not that he knew a lot. Seems it was a package job. His mob, the Lewisham mob, the Water Rats and the Friary Lane crowd, Birnie Samuels, Ginger Williams, Monkey McVee, Big Pat, Scotch Jack, all that lot. They got a flat fee, paid in advance. The organisation was done by the Friars, but they weren’t paying for it. They were being paid, same as the others.”
“Any idea where the money came from?”
“Colt didn’t know. He said the buzz was it was a Trombo job. But dirty fivers are dirty fivers wherever they start from.”
Morrissey thought about this. He said, “Water Rats? That’s a new one.”
“They come and go like Fourth Division football clubs,” said Brannigan sourly. “The Rats are mostly sailors from the Baltic. Poland. Latvia. Places like that. The skippers know they’ll hop ashore given half a chance. So they anchor in midstream and keep the lights on at night. But some of them always manage to slip through somehow. When they get on shore they’ve got no papers and they can’t get jobs so they just naturally turn to villainy.”
Morrissey scratched his thickened nose with a big thumb. He said, “Fourth Division clubs, eh? Give themselves a fancy name. Cause a bit of trouble. Then go too far and get stamped on. Small stuff. Small ideas. Small resources. That’s the way it’s been, ever since we put down the Krays and the Richardsons. Now it’s a bit different. We’ve got to thank Mr Trombo for that.”
“I’ve heard a lot about him since I came here,” said Brannigan cautiously. “He’s quite a local character.”
“He’s a character, all right,” said Morrissey. “No question. He’s a Maltese. Was a mess steward, or something like that, in an A.A. Regiment in Singapore when the Japs took over. He wasn’t a soldier, so they didn’t put him inside. Made himself useful, running errands in and out of the camps. Made himself a bit of money, too. After the war he came back to England. Land of hope and glory and a spiv’s paradise just then, by all accounts. Now he’s what you might call an institution. You want a dirty job done, but you can’t handle it yourself because doing dirty jobs isn’t your scene. All you got to do is get in touch with Mr Trombo. Pay him the rate for the job, and he’ll organise it for you. Like you ring up Messrs. Whoosit and Whatsit when you want to put on a wedding reception. And there was one thing about any job he did. It’d be done proper. The people he uses do what they’re told. No less and no more. Early on there was one time when someone wanted a restaurant in the Borough roughed up. Damage the place but not the people, Trombo said. He let it out to a small crowd from Stepney. They got overenthusiastic and messed about some of the girls. Trombo said, all right. You don’t do what you’re told, you don’t get paid. Not a penny piece. They started to shout the odds. Trombo said nothing and he did nothing, for about a week. Then he brought a real heavy mob down from Glasgow, who stamped those Stepney yobs into the pavement. He hasn’t had much trouble since.”
Sergeant Brannigan was listening carefully. He knew that Morrissey didn’t talk for the sake of talking. He said, “About that job yesterday. I did think the drivers must have been bought. If they’d kept to the main road there wouldn’t have been much chance of an ambush.”
“What did they say?”
“What they said was, they’d been given the route by the supervisor. He said he chose it special, because it was a quick way into the City. Cut out the traffic at New Cross and the Old Kent Road. Difficult to pin anything on to him or them.”
Morrissey had lumbered to his feet and moved over to the window of the charge room in Flanders Lane Police Station. It was wide open, and the London summer smell of tar and diesel was blowing in, faintly mixed with the smells of the river. He said, “Mr Trombo’s got a good intelligence service. Half the barmen and taxi drivers and newspaper sellers in this part of London are on his payroll. He’ll know, by now, that I’ve come to talk to you about last night’s job. He’ll know that we’ve picked up Colt and that he may very likely have started to talk. He won’t be worried, but he’ll be wondering what we’re going to do next. What I like to do is the obvious thing—sometimes.”
Morrissey’s mouth opened in a grin which exposed two gold-capped teeth. It had been his tactic in the ring. To do the obvious thing when his opponent was expecting subtlety. “You say you’ve never met him. You ought to make a point of getting to know the local celebrities. Why don’t you call on him?”
“I might do that,” said Brannigan.
Later, he said to Detective Constable Wrangle, “The way the old man talked about him, it was almost respectful. Like as though he knew we should never pin anything on to him, so we ought to treat him gently.”
Wrangle, who had worked with Morrissey before, said, “I wouldn’t bank on it, Sergeant. I heard him talking like that about Paul and Abel Crow. That was a few weeks before he smashed ‘em for good.”
Brannigan said, “Well, I did think, for a moment, he’d gone soft.”
Later that day he drove down to Burminster Street, which runs between Chain Walk and Stafford Quay, a corner of eighteenth-century London almost untouched by the hand of time. Trombo’s shop was the biggest in the street. It specialised in kitchen equipment, and its two windows were full of grinders, mixers, choppers and knives. Knives of all sizes and shapes. There was one he noticed about fifteen inches long. Very heavy and sharp and tapering to a fine point. The card under it said, “All-Purpose Knife.” Whilst Brannigan was wondering what those purposes might include, the door opened and a plump, middle-aged man looked out. Brannigan had no doubt that it was the owner of the shop. He said, “Admiring my new lines, Sergeant? We got them in last week from Sweden. You won’t find a better piece of steel in Sheffield. Go through the toughest meat like a hot knife through butter.”
“They look useful,” agreed Brannigan.
“But you didn’t come here shopping, I’m sure of that. Come inside.”
The voice was difficult to place. It was almost classless, but Brannigan could hear the faint undertones of a foreigner who had learned to speak English almost, but not quite, young enough to forget his own language. In the officers’ mess of the A. A. Regiment, or touting round the prison camps of Singapore?
He said, “I wanted a word with you.”
“Of course. Come in. We can talk in my office.”
They walked down the shop between the counters crammed with goods, each tended by a brown-faced, smiling boy. From the eastern end of the Mediterranean—Cypriots, perhaps, or Beiruti Arabs, Brannigan guessed. The office was an oasis of neatness among all this clutter. A table, a telephone, two chairs, a rolltop desk. Trombo waved the Sergeant into one of the chairs, sat down in the other, opened the desk and pulled out a box of cigars.
“Help yourself, Sergeant. Best Havanas. Smoked by Fidel Castro himself.”
Without waiting for an answer he snipped the ends with a gold cigar cutter, handed one to the Sergeant, extracted a long box of matches and struck one.
“Never insult a good cigar with a cigarette lighter. I’m sure you know that. Good? That’s right.” He lit his own cigar and leaned back in his chair. “Now, Sergeant. Tell me what I can do for you.”
Brannigan, who was conscious that he had been manoeuvred into a false position, took his time over answering. Instead, he studied the face through the curling wreaths of cigar smoke.
Unquestionably there was authority, in the firm chin and the shaded eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. Not the authority of birth or breeding, but of enterprise and success. An authority that came from challenging the world on its own terms and winning. He wondered what was wrong because, although the individual parts were agreeable enough, the face did not quite add up. Perhaps it was a hint of looseness in the mouth.
Brannigan realised that it was up to him to explain his visit. He said, “Did you hear of the trouble in Palmerstone Street last night? A lorry hijacked and its contents burnt.”
“I not only heard about it, Sergeant—I read about it. It was in all the papers this morning. It seemed to me to be a singularly pointless piece of vandalism.”
“What the papers didn’t say was that we caught one of the men responsible.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t catch them all.”
“And he seemed to have an idea that the whole affair had been organised by you.”
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Why?”
“Because, Sergeant, once you give a dog a bad name you can hang him twenty times over. I have never been able to understand how the theory arose that I was—what would you call it—a master criminal. But it is a fact that nowadays every episode of violence or law breaking which takes place in London is automatically attributed to me. If it was not so embarrassing, I should find it funny.”
“It must be embarrassing,” agreed Brannigan. “Can you tell me where you were last night?”
“You don’t read your local newspapers?”
“I haven’t much time for that.”
“Then you missed an interesting news item. I was the guest of honour at the opening of the new Boys’ Club in Lewisham. I accompanied the Mayor and other notables at the opening ceremony and spent the evening in the club. I played five games of table tennis and three games of darts and lost them all.”
“I see.”
“When you say, ‘I see,’ in that tone of voice, what you really mean is that you don’t see. You don’t see that the fact that I was not actually present in Palmerstone Street necessarily means that I didn’t organise what happened there. You picture me as the spider in the middle of his web contriving illicit activities.”
Since this was exactly what Sergeant Brannigan was picturing, he thought it better to say nothinTrombo leaned forward across the table. He had stopped smiling. His voice was serious. He said, “I am a law-abiding citizen. I pay my rates and taxes. I contribute as generously as I can to all local causes.”
Brannigan knew this to be true. He still said nothing. He wondered what was coming.
Choosing his words with evident care, Trombo said, “I would give a great deal if my unfortunate reputation could be buried and forgotten. I have always been on the side of law and order. It would be worth a lot to me if I could feel that the forces of law and order were on my side. You are new to this district, Sergeant, and new brooms sweep clean. But they also signal a new start. I should like to think that you, personally, were able to disregard unfounded rumours and give me the benefit of that old legal adage that a man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty.”
As Sergeant Brannigan drove back to the police station, still smoking the cigar, which really was an excellent one, he realised that he had been offered a bribe. He realised, too, that it had been so skilfully done that a tape recording of their conversation, had one been taken, would have demonstrated nothing improper.
From Flanders Lane, Morrissey ambled gently through the sunny, smelly dockland streets towards Rotherhithe Station, where he caught a train to Whitechapel. As he got into the carriage one of the men already there pushed past him to get out, treading on his toes as he did so and moving away down the platform. Morrissey shouted after him, “Watch where you’re putting your big, flat plates, Birdie.” The man did not condescend to look round, but got into a carriage farther down and slammed the door. Morrissey grinned. He had put “Birdie” Redsell away three times for burglary.
At Whitechapel he changed on to the District Line train for St. James’s Park and walked across the road to the towering steel and glass building which was the new home of New Scotland Yard. He returned the salute of the constable on duty in the reception area and took the lift to the fourth floor.
The notice on the door said, “Arthur Abel.” The man behind the desk had white hair, rosy cheeks and twinkling blue eyes. He would have passed, in any cathedral town, for a senior clergyman, possibly even for an archdeacon. He was head of the joint Metropolitan and City of London Fraud Squads.
Morrissey said, “I’ve come to waste some more of your time, A.A. Have you got anything for me?”
“It’s never a waste of time talking to you,” said Abel. “Sit down. You’re getting fat.”
“Fat and slow,” said Morrissey gloomily.
“Nonsense. I expect you could still do a hundred yards in even time if you had to.”
“If I had to run a hundred yards I should blow a valve.”
Abel had produced an armful of folders from one of his filing cabinets and dumped them on the desk. They were full of company accounts and reports. He said, “I’ve had our legal branch working on this lot. It’s an interesting organisation that your friend Mr Blackett has built up. It’s based on four or five streams of companies which can intertrade without being legally interconnected.”
“Keep it simple,” said Morrissey. “Nothing more than two syllables if you can help it.”
“Let me give you an example of one of the ‘streams.’ Then you’ll see how it works. At the bottom you’ve got three small companies. Percy Cornford, who deal in paints and dyes; Harmond, who manufacture and sell printing ink; and Implex, who import paper from Scandinavia.”
“All straight?”
“All perfectly straight. Old-fashioned family companies formed by the fathers or grandfathers of the present owners. Friendly connections with their suppliers, a good name in the trade. In each case they had got into difficulties after the war, trying to fight off the big combines. The trouble being that they were undercapitalised. Blackett supplied the capital.”
“And took over the company.”
“In fact, yes. Legally, no. He got fifty-one per cent of the shares, but two per cent of those went to his chauffeur. Who obviously does what Blackett tells him. But the fact that it’s an obvious wangle doesn’t alter the legal position.”
Morrissey grunted. He had a low opinion of lawyers and their wangles.
“The next rank above them are two larger companies. One of them is a printing outfit, Sayborn Art Printers, the second is a property company, Cavaliero. It buys and sells and leases advertising sites. A very specialised job since the Planning Acts came in. Then, at the top of that particular pyramid you’ll find Holmes and Holmes, which is one of the three largest advertising agencies in Great Britain. Do you begin to see the picture?”
“You mean they can take in each other’s washing.”
“Intertrading is the name of the game. The point of it is that the Revenue can only take a sizeable bite of a company’s profits when they go above a certain figure. So if you control all the inlets and outlets you can arrange that this doesn’t happen. Suppose Sayborn Art Printers looks like making too much money—they trade with other people, too, remember—all Blackett has to do is put up the price at which they buy from Cornford, Harmond and Implex. And vice versa.”
“So what does he get out of it for himself?”
“Fifty or sixty prosperous companies, each paying him a fee and expenses as a consultant. The expenses being largely tax-free. It’s not been an easy sum to work out, because some of the figures are guesswork, but he probably pulls in an income, after tax, of around eighty thousand pounds a year.”
“After tax?”
“In his pocket.”
“And there’s nothing anyone can do about it?”
“They can nibble away at his expense allowances. But part of his trade is international. This gives him an excuse for a lot of entertainment. Weekend house parties for foreign V.I.P.’s. If he’s got friendly accountants, which he has, he can pretty well live on his expense account.”
“Then what does he spend his real money on? Boyfriends?”
“1 can tell you one thing he doesn’t spend much of it on, and that’s shares. If he did, we’d pick up the investment income in his tax returns. Probably he invests in things which don’t bring in income. Like antiques and pictures and gold.”
“I read a story once,” said Morrissey, “about a man who bought a lot of gold. He filled his cellar with it. Gold pots and pans, trays and boxes and such. And because he didn’t want anyone to know about it, he covered them all with black paint. Then he went and died in a car crash, and no one knew anything about them. They thought they were a lot of old rubbish and gave them all away to a jumble sale in aid of charity.”
“A very moral story,” agreed Abel gravely.
As Morrissey walked back down Petty France he was thoughtful. What he had said was true. He was getting slow. Slower at walking, slower at turning, slower at hitting. But not, he hoped, slower at thinking.
This was important. He was going to need all his wits about him, because a very complex set of arrangements, code name “Operation Snakes and Ladders,” was moving steadily towards its climax.