Chapter Seventeen

Flood

Mannering heard a splash which told him that the Yard man had fallen into the puddle near the car. Mannering edged towards the front of it. He heard the man grunting. There was no other shooting; apart from the Yard man’s gasping breath and the traffic at the far end of the street, there was no sound at all.

Then footsteps clattered, the street door opened, Mannering glanced round and saw Lorna.

“Go back!” he cried, “go back!”

She ignored him and came running; but there was no more shooting. Breathless, she reached him, and he felt the tension of her body and the cold steel of a gun which she thrust into his hand.

“He’s left the window,” she gasped, and paused for breath. “He might go out the back way, but—”

Mannering was watching the door of the house where the man had been; where he was. It began to open. He rose, stealthily, his right hand holding the gun, his left on Lorna’s arm, keeping her down. He looked over the rain-splashed bonnet, and saw the door opening wider; a hand appeared. Traffic swished by at the end of the street, but nothing turned into the street itself.

“Darling, be—careful.” Lorna spoke jerkily.

“Quiet.”

The Yard man still lay in the pool of water, making no sound now. Was he dead? Unconscious? Mannering caught a glimpse of him lying on his side; at least he wasn’t going to drown.

“Mind!” cried Lorna.

The door of the house opposite opened wide, a man leapt into sight, short, stocky, dressed in light brown. His gun was pointed towards the car. Mannering took one shot, then ducked as the man emptied his gun at the Rolls-Bentley. A bullet smacked against the bonnet just above Mannering’s head and richocheted off; Mannering felt it stir his hair.

“Oh, keep down!” Lorna cried, and held him tightly.

The man raced into the street, turned right towards the Embankment, and ran wildly, Mannering shook Lorna off, and stood up. The man was a moving target but within range; Mannering aimed for his legs.

Then he heard a scream.

He knew, in that instance, who it came from. It was strange, highpitched, eerie, startling. The running man, traffic along the Embankment, everything else vanished from sight as he turned his head.

Miranda stood in the doorway of the house, mouth wide open, eyes filled with awful terror; screaming.

The moment passed. Mannering, teeth clamped tightly together, swung round towards the running gunman, who was close to the corner, nearly out of range.

“Look after her,” Mannering rasped. “’Phone 999, and see to that chap.” The Yard man lay quite still, and Lorna didn’t move, but turned and looked at Miranda as if the scream had paralysed her.

Miranda screamed again.

Half-prepared for it as he was, Mannering still felt its effect. It went through him like the screaming whine of a handsaw scraping against metal. He clenched his teeth again as he pulled open the door of the car and slid into the driving-seat.

The gunman had turned the corner.

Mannering started the engine, swung the wheel, swished through water a yard from the feet of the unconscious Yard man. In his driving-mirror he saw a taxi turn into Green Street from the King’s Road end; possible help for Lorna. He put his foot down, and the car leapt forward. Then almost in front of him the surface of the road broke, a gush of seething, muddy yellow water leapt two yards into the air. He jammed on the brakes, then gradually swung the wheel. The force of the water caught the side of the car, and the wheel was almost wrenched out of his hands. He held on, tyres squealing against the kerb. The car quivered, and slithered to a standstill. Just behind him, the water gushed like a huge, tumultuous fountain; it was already running axle-deep beneath the car, flooding the kerb and the pavement, and coming half-way up the car’s wheels.

As it gushed and rushed past, Mannering knew that he no longer had a chance to catch up with the man. Trying would be a waste of time. He turned and looked back. The gush was coming out of a burst main more slowly now, just a tumbling hillock of turbulence, but water several inches deep stretched right across the road.

The taxi had stopped, with water up to its running board.

The driver and young Wainwright were lifting the Yard man from the water. Lorna stood in the doorway, an arm round Miranda, but Mannering couldn’t see Miranda properly. For the first time, he felt a spasm of irritation with her; but for that scream he would have brought the gunman down.

He got out and hurried across the road, wading ankle deep.

“You managing?”

“Okay,” said the cabbie, a short middle-aged man wearing a brand-new trilby hat, startling on top of a head of untidy grey hair and above a face badly in need of a shave. “We’ll take him in.”

Mannering turned towards the house. Lorna couldn’t do anything because Miranda was clinging to her, the tension of her slim young body was evident, and Lorna just couldn’t get free. Miranda was crying, her shoulders quaking, odd little whining sounds were coming from her lips.

She had screamed.

It was the first sound Mannering had heard her utter, yet his first swift reaction had been resentment, not far removed from anger. He didn’t think much of himself for that. He squeezed Lorna’s arm as he went past. No one was in at the ground-floor flat, and he ran up the stairs, finding Ethel and a neighbour at the open door of the flat on the first floor.

“Is—is everything all right, sir?” She was trembling.

“Not too bad, Ethel. Mrs. Harington” – the neighbour was a friendly fifty or so – “a man has been hurt, and they may want to bring him into your flat.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Harington exclaimed. “I’d better turn down a bed. May Ethel lend me a hand?”

“Of course.” Mannering was already half-way up the stairs to his flat.

He dialled 999, reported briskly, and then called Fenn; Fenn wasn’t in. Mannering moved away from the telephone. The sun was shining a long way off, but immediately overhead was a dark cloud which looked as if it were going to drench the district again. A few big drops of rain fell. There was a strange yellow tinge in the sky, on the surface of the Thames, on the moving traffic, the roofs, the roads; everything. The centre of the storm was moving sluggishly northwards.

He felt a little easier, without knowing why.

He hoped that policeman wouldn’t die.

He kept seeing a mind picture of the assassin.

Mannering went into the bedroom, and closed the door. Lorna was sitting at the dressing-table; when he had come in she had been looking at herself intently, and without any satisfaction. Now, she turned sharply to face him. The swiftness of her movement betrayed her tension; even though she relaxed into a smile, evidence of nervous strain was still there.

It was nearly half-past eight; and the first time they had been alone since the shooting in Green Street.

The police had come, an ambulance had followed, but the Yard man hadn’t been badly hurt. That was his good luck; a bullet had grazed his temple, and the wound had bled freely. He had been taken to hospital but not detained.

There had been the usual stream of questions, the routine, the deliberate hand-written notes in thick note-books, all this at an exasperatingly slow tempo.

Then Grimble had arrived and quickened things a little. But there hadn’t been much that Mannering could tell him, except to describe the man who had fired the shot.

Miranda had been the big problem.

The shooting seemed to have done something to her which nothing else had succeeded in doing. Except for the screams, she had uttered no intelligible sound, but – she had screamed; some release of terror had made her find her voice.

Richardson, whom Lorna told by telephone, was noncommittal, said that he was going to discuss the case with Lancelot Nash, and promised to report as soon as he could.

Wainwright had helped the police, then reported to Mannering; and although it was obvious that his mind was really on Miranda, he hadn’t skimped the reports of his inquiries. It was quite simple; seven different contacts, most of them friends and trusties of the absent Larraby, had warned him not to have anything at all to do with Crummy Day, of Aldgate High Street.

“Of course, I couldn’t tie any of them down to a specific reason, sir,” Wainwright had said, “but they just didn’t trust him. Two or three just laughed at the thought of you having anything to do with him. Simply laughed.”

“Then we won’t have any truck with him,” Mannering had said, with outward solemnity.

Wainwright had grinned.

“And while I was in the East End I made a few inquiries about that man Dibben,” he went on. “He has a shocking reputation. He’s a—ah—mobsman, of course, and has quite a reputation for forcing locks. It’s common rumour that he works for Crummy Day. And Day uses a lot of young chaps to lift—steal, sorry, sir—for him. He buys the stuff. I’m told Day’s reputation is bad even among crooks,” went on Wainwright, with great precision. “No one trusts him.”

“Did you see Dibben?”

“No, but I met his wife.”

“What’s she like?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Wainwright, with great candour, “she is quite a nice little thing, pretty and really quite smart. She wouldn’t say anything about Dibben, but obviously she was worried about him. He’s been away for several days. It’s common talk among his friends that he’s ‘working’.”

“You managed to get around,” Mannering had remarked.

“As a matter of fact, I met a friend of Josh Larraby’s, right at the beginning,” Wainwright had said. “He has a little trinket shop in Chenn Street. He recognised me, and—well, I had a kind of open sesame to all Larraby’s friends. He has an astonishing number, all knowledgeable,” Wainwright had gone on, “in his way he’s quite a genius.”

Larraby was now the manager of Quinns; had at one time been Mannering’s contact man in the East End and, before that, been in prison for four years for jewel robbery. Wainwright didn’t know that, and Mannering didn’t enlighten him.

But Larraby was getting old, Wainwright apparently saw his chance of getting well in the line of succession. And now that Sylvester had gone …

Mannering went across to Lorna, put his hands on her shoulders, and looked at her and his own reflection in the dressing-table mirror. She hadn’t been satisfied, but he saw no reason to complain. They looked at each other steadily, Mannering quiet and sombre, Lorna pale and still tense.

He told her about Sylvester.

He could see the little colour she had left ebbing from her cheeks. She didn’t speak. In a lot of ways he wished she would.

He didn’t tell her about Dibben’s message, but that was poor consolation, because she knew that a man had been lying in wait for him.

He said, “It won’t last much longer. If Miranda could tell all she knows, she might be able to put an end to it in a matter of hours.” He squeezed Lorna’s shoulders, then moved away, sitting on a window-seat, lighting a cigarette. “No, don’t move.” He could see her profile in the mirror while her face was turned towards him. He didn’t smile.

“There was one thing Richardson said that I didn’t tell you,” Lorna said. “Miranda’s trouble was caused by a shock, and another shock might cure her. Also—” Lorna paused.

“Yes,” said Mannering, softly.

“A shock big enough to cure her might also kill her, or else turn her mind for the rest of her life,” said Lorna with great precision.

Mannering said, “I see.” He moved restlessly, frowning. “What actually made Miranda scream?”

“I think it was your gun.”

Mannering didn’t speak.

“She’d screamed before, upstairs,” Lorna said. “It was the scream that made me go to the window. She was looking out, and I heard this sound, it was—well, uncanny’s hardly the word. It really scared me. Then I ran to the window. She was looking at the man across the road, and he had a gun, pointing it at you. I think—”

She broke off, jumped up, spun round. Mannering was off his seat and streaking towards the door in a split second.

For Miranda screamed again.