THE grandfather clock on the landing of Number Twelve Fourtrees Road was striking noon as Pike came out of the room in which, with Dr Jack and Miss Marable in attendance, lay Molly Brade. An hour before Molly Brade had been a charming and healthy and smiling young matron of something under thirty. Now, upon the bed in her darkened room, she was a dumb and shivering creature who might have been any age over forty-five. Since she had been put, outside The Market, into a car commandeered by Pike, no word—nor even any sound—had escaped her. But she shook, she shook unceasingly. She shook so that her legs would not support her nor her hands obey her. Even as he came out of the room and closed the door softly behind him, Pike could hear the rattling of the frame of her bed as it knocked against the wall.
There was a man waiting for Pike downstairs. It was Curtis, who, having meant to speak so soon as he saw his chief, was, experienced though he might be, stricken for a moment into silence by the sight of his chief’s face. Curtis said, after that pregnant instant:
‘It’s all right, sir, we’ve got him. Found him at The Carters up on Burrowbad Hill. He’s very drunk; leastways he’s acting very drunk. Dunno which myself …’
‘Get a doctor!’ Pike’s words came out like small, keen bullets.
‘Got one, sir,’ said Curtis. ‘First thing I did. Dr Seneschal. With him now—’
‘What’s he say?’ Once more Pike’s words cut across the other’s talk like a sharp knife through soft material.
‘Didn’t wait, sir.’ Now Curtis was gathering something of his chief’s urgency; his words were coming quicker and faster and clearer. ‘Came to report. Blaine went down to The Market with Jeffson and four men. Farrow and Davis are there, too. They’re following your instructions and letting the catch out one by one and searching ’em.’ Curtis shrugged. ‘But somehow I don’t fancy, sir, they’ll get anything.’ He shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. It seemed to him that the eyes of Superintendent Pike were like red-hot gimlets boring right through him.
But Pike, for a long moment, said nothing. When he did speak it was in a voice subtly altered; a voice which showed at least its owner’s effort for calmness and normality. He said:
‘What’s that row outside?’
Curtis seemed startled. ‘Row, sir?’ He turned, craning his head to listen. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Did see one or two people sort of … sort of staring at the house as I come in just now … Don’t know what they were at, I’m sure.’
Pike snatched his hat from the chair upon which it lay. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Got the car out?’
Curtis nodded. ‘Ready waiting, sir. Where’re we going?’
‘Market,’ said Pike and in two strides was at the front door and had it open.
He left the house, Curtis on his heels, as if he would take the flagged path to Miss Marable’s gate in four strides. And probably he would had he been able. But he was not able. There were obstructions between him and the car; obstructions even between him and the gate. And the obstructions were people. He had spoken to Curtis just now of a ‘noise outside,’ but his mind had been so busy that, once having asked the question, it had switched off even the continued and growing existence of the noise so that when, with the opening of the door and his appearance, a strange, snarling cry from perhaps thirty throats smote the air, he was as astonished as if he had had no warning …
The crowd—for although there were well under fifty people in it, it seemed like a crowd—was unequally divided between the sexes. Fully four-fifths of it were women and it was this which made Pike halt. Before the gate and in the path, blocking his way, they were all women. Had they been men, his present mood and temper, added to experience, ability and a natural love of physical strife, would have taken him through them like a needle through sacking. But they were not men …
He checked in his rush which had been almost a run, walked steadily but slowly. He saw their faces like uncouth, writhing gargoyles mouthing at him. He heard their cries like animal execrations. He halted. He said, and his tone was the tone of that young police constable Arnold Pike who, twenty years before, had moved along his first street crowd somewhere in Rotherhithe:
‘Now, what’s all this!’
The screaming and shouting went on. The gargoyles mouthed ever louder but ever more incoherent. Behind the gate two of the few men brandished walking sticks and upon the inner side the gate one of the women waved a steel-ferruled umbrella and, detaching herself from her fellows, rushed at Pike—and the astonished Curtis behind him—with bony fingers hooked like claws. This one was gargoyle indeed. The mad stress of unusual and terrific emotion distorted what once had been a pleasant and even motherly face into that of a wry-mouthed and fanatical ghoul …
She came straight for Pike. Her hands worked in the air, promising themselves his face. White crusting foam flaked at the corners of her mouth, whose lips were stretched back from yellow irregular teeth. Her shapeless hat had been pushed to the back of her head and from under its brim, which should have been down over her eyes, escaped four streaming strands of greyish, lack-lustre hair …
Pike stood his ground. He waited, hands at his sides. With one half of his vision upon this advancing Fury he yet kept the other half upon the other momentarily less active furies behind. And now he saw that beside the waving sticks and the first waving umbrella were now arms being brandished and at the end of most of the arms were other sticks, other umbrellas, other rude and homely clubs. If he had not seen what he had just seen; if he had not been through what he had just been through; if what he had seen and been through during the past hour had not momentarily taken away his sense of humour, he would have smiled and the smile would soon have turned into a laugh … But the Fury was upon him. He was forced to save his face from those itching, clawing fingers. He caught the bony wrist and twisted it just once and said: ‘Be quiet now … What’s all this!’
She screamed at him, bellowing a thin, high, piercing bellow of which not a word was audible.
Seeing her in the clutch of the figurehead upon whom their temporary and utterly unusual rage had made them wish to vent their vengeance, many of the supporters moved up. Those upon the inner side of the gate pressed forward. Those upon the outside of the gate thrust the gate open and, jamming themselves in its narrow opening, began to pour through.
Pike stood his ground. Still calmly, but a great deal more fiercely than it seemed, he gripped the now helpless Fury’s wrist. From behind Pike Curtis came and stood himself to face the oncoming rush.
‘Now then!’ said Curtis. ‘Now—then! What’s all this! What’s all this!’
The onrush checked. One man alone came charging forward. He brandished in his right hand a thick walking stick of oak. Curtis, without even the slightest hesitation, let fly. His fist, which was like the knee of an ox, caught the attacker squarely upon the point of the chin, and the attacker went backwards to crash amongst the greenness of Miss Marable’s neat box hedge.
‘Now then!’ said Curtis again. ‘Now then! Any more for any more?’
Apparently there were not. Now sticks were lowered and umbrellas and all those other club-like things which had been waved. Once more the curious snarling sound of the mob’s voice filled the air. But now Pike and Curtis were able to distinguish, if not the words, at least the main purport …
‘You don’t want,’ said Pike to the woman whose wrist he was holding, ‘to be so silly!’
‘All right!’ said Curtis. ‘All right! Stop your shouting. Speak one at a time. All come along here if there’s any more for any more!’
‘At first,’ said Pike to the woman whose wrist he was holding, ‘I didn’t know what all of you were driving at, but I’ve got it now. You don’t want to be so silly! Everybody’s doing their best—including myself.’ His face took on suddenly an even leaner aspect, harsh and fierce and somehow a little wild. He said, after a pause:
‘I know what’s got you, all of you! It’s because it was a child … I knew that child. Understand that! … I was doing my job and I’ll do it still in the same way, but if anything I’m going to do it harder and better than I did before. Got that? … What’s the good of you people coming and trying to put paid to me? Not a scrap! All you’re doing is to make more trouble so that the police can’t get on with the very work you’re wanting them to do …’
For the first time since he had begun talking the woman spoke. Her words were preceded by a strange, shrill laugh like a humourless neigh. She said, after this sound:
‘Work! Police! Call yourself police? Call yourself police! And here you go letting these devils walk about murdering little children …’
Pike’s face went suddenly ash-white beneath its tan. His grip upon the wrist tightened suddenly and cruelly; tightened and twisted.
‘A-ah!’ said the woman.
‘Be quiet!’ said Pike. ‘Curtis! …’
‘Sir,’ said Curtis turning, but yet, by the attitude of his body, conveying to the crowd behind him that still his challenge of ‘any more for any more’ was open.
‘Take this woman,’ said Pike. ‘Keep her in the back of the car while I drive. She’s under arrest. Charges are obstructing the police in the execution of their duty and acting in a manner likely to cause a breach of the peace. Also assault. And Curtis, no bail. She’d better be kept in.’
‘Right, sir!’ said Curtis. His round, red, shrewd-looking face gave no indication on its exterior of the smile which was breaking behind it. ‘Any of these too, sir?’ He half turned as he spoke, nodding over his shoulder to the suddenly cooling little crowd of valiants. The man he had hit was now upon his hands and knees just by the box hedge into which he had fallen. He was being very sick.
Pike, some of the colour back in his tanned face, shook his head. ‘Not unless there’s any more trouble. Tell them!’
Curtis raised his voice and told them. Curtis added that they had better move along quickly.
Like sheep they hesitated, staring, the faces now no longer gargoyles but merely and yet rather terribly ovine. And then, still like sheep, they followed the sudden movement of a new leader. One of the men it was this time. The man who had been behind the one whom Curtis had hit. This man left the garden, turned to his right and began, muttering to himself and swinging his stick, to walk down the road towards Marrowbone Lane and, therefore, the police station. Like sheep they shuffled after him and, perhaps even more imitative than sheep, they too muttered among themselves.
There was no further disorder. The way to the blue Crossley was clear. Curtis took the other wrist of Pike’s prisoner and Pike, releasing his grip, went swiftly to the car and straight to the driving seat. The woman tried to hang back from Curtis’s pull but she was now merely a bewildered and frightened and suddenly awakened lower-middle-class mother. She began to weep softly. Two tears rolled down her roughened, seamed face. She tried to speak but could not. Curtis got her to the car and threw the door open and thrust her inside. She went, not like a sheep, but like a lamb.
Curtis got in beside her, slamming the door behind him. Pike driving, the blue Crossley purred and was off, passing the now straggled flock who gazed some with angry, some with bewildered, some with terrified eyes at the prisoner within it. But no voice was raised and no movement was made towards the car, though, of Pike’s set purpose, it moved past the flock at no more than ten miles an hour.
Pike turned left into Marrowbone Lane, accelerating suddenly and, taking the next turning to the right into Collingwood Road, brought the car to a standstill. He turned and spoke to Curtis behind him. ‘Let her get out,’ he said. Curtis, reaching across his prisoner, opened the door next to the left-hand pavement.
‘Out you get!’ said Curtis, jerking his thumb at the way of release.
The woman stared at him vacantly. Her face still worked and unshed tears stood in her tired eyes.
‘Out you get!’ said Curtis again.
But still she made no movement. Pike turned once more in his seat. He said, quietly:
‘You don’t want to go to prison, do you? If you don’t, get out. I don’t know your name; I haven’t seen you before; so I can’t come for you later—if you go now.’
Then she went. As she stood upon the edge of pavement she looked at Pike and said something. They never knew what it was for Curtis’s slamming of the door and Pike’s rather noisy getting into gear drowned her words. She was left standing on the pavement staring after them.
When they reached it, all the doors of The Market were closed. And all around The Market was a thin, ever-swelling crowd which, having sensed drama from afar, was flocking to gaze with wildly speculating eyes at the blank, white walls and now shrouded windows.
There are five entrances to The Market and outside each of these entrances was now a uniformed constable. Patrolling the right-angled two sides of public frontage of The Market were two uniformed sergeants of police and these, every now and then, paused in their patrolling and bade the encroaching crowd to ‘move on there.’
A hard, yellow winter sun was shining upon The Market. The air was crisp and cold and exhilarating like some pleasant, heady wine. The sky was a bright, hard, cheerful blue and the railed-off lawns between The Market and the Holmdale Theatre were green as pantomime emeralds.
It was upon such days that the winter aspect of Holmdale was at its best. Ordinarily, upon such days, even its most bitter decriers were forced grudgingly to admit that, for the purely temporary visitor, Holmdale might hold a certain play-box charm. And yet, upon this day, something had crept in which spoilt the sunlight and the air and the grass and the cheerful red and white buildings; some intangible, invisible miasma which sapped the beauty from these things and left men with a cold, black cloak of horror and apprehension weighing upon their souls. It was as if all the kindly, gay-seeming of things was staged to vent the bitter mockery of an angry god.
Pike’s face, as he walked across the pavement from the car to The Market main entrance, was white and grim and set. Even Curtis, that utterly unimaginative person, seemed to walk with a heavier step.
The policeman guarding the doors saluted. They passed him by. The swing doors rolled round for their entrance. Just within the doors stood Inspector Farrow. At the sight of Pike, his frowning, heavy face took on a look of pleased relief. He touched his cap. Pike nodded.
‘Any result?’ said Pike. ‘S’ppose not.’
Farrow shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘How are you working it?’ Pike was crisp. ‘Didn’t have time to leave full instructions.’
Farrow consulted the back of an envelope which he held in his hand and upon which he had, apparently, been scribbling in pencil. He said:
‘There were a hundred and fifty-three customers in when you had the doors closed; fifty-one assistants and eleven on the manager’s staff, including the general manager himself, Mr Cuthbert Mellon. Blaine’s split the whole lot into two batches. One batch is in the café with a couple of uniformed men watching ’em. The other batch is in the Hairdressing, with the same. Blaine got a couple of sisters from the hospital for searching the women and two of my sergeants are doing the men. As they’re done they’re giving their names and getting passed out through the back way … All right, sir?’
Pike nodded. ‘Very good. How many’ve they done?’
‘I was round there a minute ago, sir, and they’d done seventy-one, they told me.’
‘Any trouble?’
Farrow shrugged. ‘Some of ’em were a bit upset like. Some a bit scared. No real trouble. Shall I take you across there, sir? They’re searching ’em in the manager’s suet.’
Pike nodded. He fell into step beside Farrow and they started to walk, Curtis following like a solid ghost, through the echoing building, threading their way between its now tenantless, well-stocked counters.
‘Nothing yet, I suppose,’ said Pike, as they turned out of the Haberdashery and round a corner, right-handed, past Books.
Farrow shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir.’ He looked curiously at his companion. ‘Would you say yourself that we’ll find anything?’
Pike was silent. Suddenly, at the end of Books, he halted. He said:
‘Café’s behind there, isn’t it?’ He pointed back, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
Farrow nodded.
‘And Hairdressing’s there?’ Pike pointed to his left front.
Again Farrow nodded.
‘Where’re they searching ’em?’
‘Just round here, sir.’ Farrow pointed to a door, at the far side of the department labelled ‘Refined Footwear,’ which bore upon it in red and black letters ‘Private—General Manager.’ ‘Blaine arranged that. There’s a suet of rooms there—Mr Mellon’s—and the back way out’s just behind them. There’s one of the nursing sisters using one room and then my two sergeants in the next one, which is bigger.’
‘Right!’ Pike strode on; edged his way behind the shoe counter and, reaching the door marked ‘Private’ flung it open to find himself in a narrow, asbestos-sheeting-lined passage. Straight ahead of him another door stood open and through it he could see two blue-clad backs. His long strides took him up the passage far ahead of Farrow.
He went into the room and, with one of those dramatic coincidences which happen so far more often in real life than the critics would have us suppose, just as he stepped across the threshold there came a crisis in this affair which had promised so dully.
Upon the far side of the two broad-spreading, blue-uniformed backs he had seen from the passage, there stood, his arms upraised, a small and dark and, for the nonce at least, furtive-looking little man. One of the blue-uniformed figures was still bent in a slight rigid arc as he patted and probed in pockets upon the small figure’s right-hand side. But the other—Jeffson—who had, apparently, been patting and probing upon the left-hand side, had suddenly straightened itself with an air almost comically blent of alarm and triumph …
And in his right hand Jeffson held something aloft.
At the moment when Pike made his entry, no sound had, as yet, escaped the three actors in this small drama; but there was in the air, already, a certain exciting and terrific tension …
Pike leapt forward. He snatched at Jeffson’s find …
He found himself staring at a square, yellow envelope upon which was written in a curiously backward-sloping hand and in thick, shining black ink:
The Chief Constable,
C/o Sergeant Jeffson,
13 Fourtrees Road,
Holmdale.
The small and furtive man from whose pocket Jeffson had extracted this envelope was Wilfrid Spring.
The two sergeants fell back. Pike looked at the envelope; twisted it this way and that between his fingers but never held more of it than its extreme corners. He raised his eyes and met those of Sergeant Jeffson. He nodded his head towards the prisoner.
‘Where?’ he said.
Jeffson stammered with astonishment. ‘I was just agoin’ to pass ’im out, sir, like all the others before, when I puts me ’and once more into ’is left-hand pocket ’ere and pulls out that.’ Jeffson pointed with a trembling thumb at the envelope. ‘Dunno ’ow I come to miss it the first time ’cept that it must of been fixed against the wall of ’is pocket like.’
Pike looked once more down at the envelope; then up and into the eyes of the pale-faced Spring.
‘Well,’ said Pike, lifting the envelope upwards and outwards perhaps two inches. ‘What’ve you got to say?’ His tone was non-committal and passionless, but there was behind it a strange vibration.
‘What have I got to say!’ Spring, now that the opportunity for speech had been vouchsafed to him, shed much of his furtiveness. With his own words he seemed to swell. It was as if, with each of his sentences, he became more and more convinced that Wilfrid Spring, being a person of the very greatest importance, should not be thus mishandled by a parcel of policemen … ‘What have I got to say!’ said Wilfrid Spring and proceeded to say it. There was a great deal of it. It appeared that Mr Spring had no notion whatsoever of how the strangely qualified envelope had found its way into his peculiarly perverted pocket. And Mr Spring thought that it was carnally strange that some fool of an ensanguined policeman should have, even if the envelope was found in Mr Spring’s pocket, thought Mr Spring could possibly be anything so revoltingly unimportant as the Holmdale Butcher …
That, it seemed, was what really injured Mr Spring’s feelings, the thought that a Personage such as himself, one of the best known—if not the best known—Director in England (or anywhere else for that matter) should be considered as having either the time or inclination to go about murdering people.
‘Good God, man!’ said Mr Spring, now fully himself again. ‘What the hell do you take me for?’
Pike looked at him in silence. Pike’s face showed nothing of the bewilderment which raged behind his brow. For Pike was puzzled. Was this bluff? Or was it righteous innocence, however unpleasant? Or was it that this man suffered from that peculiar form of amnesia which permitted a person to perform a deed quite foreign to his usual nature and then have it, by the grace of God or devil, completely expunged from his mind. And, anyhow, what about the weapon and its absence?
‘Besides,’ Mr Spring was saying with vehemence, ‘I can easily prove that I didn’t leave The Market from the time I came into it until the time when your blasted fellow shut the door.’
Pike shrugged. ‘If you can do that, sir, of course …’ He left the sentence in mid-air.
Jeffson was still staring at the envelope in his superior’s hand. His eyes were wide and staring and his hair, quite literally, seemed to be standing up. ‘Kor!’ Jeffson was saying. ‘Kor! Ooever would of believed it!’
Spring, suddenly losing his small temper, exploded. He pointed an irate finger at Jeffson. His horn-rimmed spectacles slipped awry on his nose giving him a peculiarly comic and inefficient look in direct contrast to his impassioned words. ‘That’s the sort of bloody fellah,’ said Spring, ‘that makes this country the impossible place to live in that it is—’
‘That’ll do, sir!’ Pike’s tone was smooth enough but very firm. ‘That’ll do! You’ll quite realise that I’ve got to detain you … Jeffson, put this man on one side.’ He swung round on the other sergeant. ‘And you carry on with the job. Detective Officer Curtis here’ll help you. Carry on, Curtis.’
It was three o’clock when, outside the white-fronted Cottage Police Station, Wilfrid Spring entered the police car and was driven away to the county gaol. There were left in Jeffson’s room, the Chief Constable, his satellites Farrow and Davis, Detective Officers Curtis and Blaine and Superintendent Arnold Pike. All these looked at each other. The room seemed full of them as indeed it nearly was.
The Chief Constable broke the silence. ‘I think,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘that that’s our man.’ He looked first at Farrow, then at Davis. He missed out Curtis and Blaine and looked last at Pike.
Pike shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t agree. In fact, if I may put in bluntly, I wouldn’t have held him. Not after those statements we’ve got from his wife and from The Market assistant.’
Tempers were on edge this afternoon. The Chief Constable exploded. ‘But blast it, man, a fellah of your experience ought to know by this time—damn it, you ought to!—that a fellah’s wife isn’t evidence—’
Pike interrupted. The interruption was courteous-seeming, but interruption nevertheless. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but we’re not talking about evidence. This isn’t a Court of Law, you know, it’s a police station and because we’ve got extraordinary powers we’ve been able to put that man into gaol … But I don’t think he’s the man. If I was a betting man, I’d lay you twenty to one that he isn’t. I don’t say that I’d actually oppose your holding him for the time being—though if I’ve read the gentleman correctly, there’ll be a heavy claim for compensation when we let him go—but I do say, and mean it, that by this time tomorrow he’ll be out. We’ve only got to collect these other witnesses he spoke of and we’ll know he was speaking the truth because these others’ve got no interest in him whatever. Can’t have. No, sir, you’ll find he’s not our man.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. The Chief Constable, very red about heavy face and thick neck, seemed several times upon the verge of speech but, perhaps fortunately, restrained himself …
It was four o’clock when a massed meeting of Holmdale citizens, rapidly, and, as it were, almost spontaneously convened, took place on the wide, tree-lined grass plot opposite the northern aspect of The Market.
A wild meeting this and as foreign to Holmdale and its ways as had been the demonstration to Pike which had taken place outside Miss Marable’s house.
It was dusk and nearly dark when Inspector Farrow, with not only a posse of rather ineffectual specials but also no fewer than eight regular constables and two mounted policemen, dispersed this meeting.
There had been much talk by this person and that. There had been wild, fierce speeches against the police and their lack of training, method, initative and morality. There had been, throughout these speeches, roared ‘Hear-hears.’ There had been a movement, put to the meeting by the most impassioned speaker—a part time socialist orator—and carried unanimously, to the effect that the citizens of Holmdale should take the law into their own hands. What, quite, they were going to do with the law when they had it, was left, as it generally is, in the thinnest of thin air …
But they were all—and with some excuse—much moved. They were all, for the moment, fire-eating, fire-breathing hard cases. They were all, for the moment, ardent disciples of Judge Lynch. They were for somebody’s blood, preferably, of course, the Butcher’s, but if the Butcher’s were not available, then for the blood of those responsible for this terrible delay in bringing the Butcher to book.
Arms were brandished. Voices were raised. Threats grew hoarse and eyes were fierce. Some of the more youthful components of the crowd—it must have numbered three hundred at least—procured from somewhere—in the way that such crowds magically will—fuel for a bonfire which, as Farrow and his men came up, was no longer belching clouds of white smoke but sending shooting tongues of red and yellow flame twenty feet into the air …
An impressive scene. And, at least to the members of the crowd, a most meaning one.
On the outskirts of the crowd, Dr Reade stopped his Chevrolet two-seater and listened to the crowd’s uproar with a sardonic smile distorting his heavy face.
The Reverend Rockwall passed by quickly, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
Far away from the crowd, Mr Wilfrid Spring was turning over in his mind, seated upon the edge of a government-issue truckle bed, the possibilities of a great publicity campaign when he should be free.
Separated from him by nine inches of stone wall, sat Mr Percy Godly in an exactly similar position … But Mr Percy Godly was thinking only, with tears in his eyes, of the cruel devil in blue which so smoothly and so often refused his bribes and prayers and pleadings for ‘just one little one.’
In the centre of the crowd stood Miss Ursula Finch, her umbrella clamped firmly beneath her left arm, shouting hoarsely with the rest, but with her keen little mind taking mental shorthand notes for a more startling issue of the Clarion than even she had ever conceived.
Behind the crowd, Mr Israel Gompertz fed the bonfire with boards from a heaven-sent packing case.
In the front ranks of the crowd, Mary Fillimore, her usually soft blue eyes hard and staring, found suddenly that she had no more voice left with which to shout.
In the centre of the crowd, Mr Colby turned with excited gratification to his neighbour, saying: ‘Thank God! Thank God! … High time more sensible men took matters into their own hands.’
Upon the first-floor balcony of his pleasant house, The Hospice, stood Sir Montague Flushing looking out with troubled face and rather frightened eyes at the leaping, starting glow of the bonfire. From where he stood the roaring snarls of the crowd smote his ears like a menace …
‘Terrible, terrible business!’ thought Mrs Rudolph Sharp as she tried to extricate herself from the fringes of the crowd, but could not.
… And then, as the thin jet from a fire extinguisher slays apparently unquenchable flame, the mere voices—throaty and assured and virile—of the maligned police plucked from this wild and bloodthirsty mob all their frightfulness. Among them, a few policemen moved solid and immovable and very, very permanent.
‘Move along there. Move along!’ said the police. ‘Get along out of this. This has got to stop,’ said the police.
And the bonfire died down. And the crowd moved along. And the units of the crowd dispersed.
Pike, as he had been a few nights ago which seemed as many years, was kneeling on the window seat of his bedroom in Number Twelve Fourtrees Road. He was thinking about Wilfrid Spring. He was regretting that he had not been able, without open breach, to prevent the Chief Constable of the County from incarcerating Wilfrid Spring. He did not object, upon humanitarian grounds, to Mr Wilfrid Spring’s incarceration, because he thought that incarceration for eighteen hours or even as many months would do Mr Wilfrid Spring a great deal of good, but he did object to the odium which must necessarily fall on to the police from the pens and mouths of the press and public. It all seemed so futile. Here they had, in gaol, a drunkard and a film director. What a pair, would press and public say alike, to pick upon. Could there be any two more unlikely to be this homicidal pervert than a man whose ambition was to crowd into his bladder as many drinks in a day as was possible and a man whose ambition in life was to produce as many flickering ghosts as possible? The one would be too busy with his alcohol; the other too busy with his ghosts. The one would be able to satisfy in his fuddled brain any latent impulse to horrid violence and the other equally able to do so (as indeed he seemed to have done) with his puppets. A drunkard, Pike thought … and a film director …
‘I wonder,’ Pike thought, ‘what sort of job that is … a film director’s. Must feel like a sort of god making men and women do, not what they want to do, but what you want ’em to do. Funny things, pictures. Some people like ’em, others don’t. Some would walk forty miles to see Lilian This and Percy That in Love’s Ashes. Others shuddered at the very name of Lilian or Percy … Great invention though … marvellous, when you came to think of it, to be able to show exactly what people did. Think of slow motion, for instance. Why, with a slow motion camera you could tell what a man did even if he didn’t know he’d done it himself … and how useful it ought to be in the future—though it was doubtful whether anyone could put it to this use—in teaching history. By Jing, if they took films of all the historic happenings—or happenings likely to be historic—which took place, and did ’em from now on, why, the kids in about a hundred years’ time would know more about us than we knew about ourselves …’
Yes, odd things, films! Very useful in all sorts of ways—all sorts of ways—they’d even been useful to scientists … No reason really why they shouldn’t be useful to the police …
‘Good Lord Almighty!’ said Pike aloud.
He leapt up and backwards from the window seat as if a bullet had narrowly missed him. Under the light he feverishly fumbled for the small notebook he always carried in a waistcoat pocket. He flicked over the leaves with an abandoned impatience utterly foreign to his nature. He found what he wanted—the address of Curtis’s billet …
Before he had knelt upon the window seat, he had taken off, as he was used to do in his Kennington flat at about this time of night—it was after eleven—his collar and tie. The boots with the very shiny toe-caps were no longer upon his feet, which were thrust into soft slippers of red brushed wool—a present to him by an elderly aunt one Christmas. A large calabash pipe had its stem clamped between his teeth and the bottom of its curve brushed against his long chin. But of collars and slippers and pipes he thought nothing. He made one stride of it to the door and five strides of it across the landing—past the door of the room where Molly Brade lay moaning, with a nurse in attendance, with an ice pack about her head. He went down the stairs in two silent leaps.
He slammed the front door behind him. He ran, having turned right, up to Marrowbone Lane and then turned right again. By sight he knew Curtis’s billet and, having consulted his notebook, now its number. He found it without difficulty. There was a light in an upper window and at this window he threw a handful of gravel plucked with almost crazy fingers from the garden path. By chance the lighted window was Curtis’s own and it was Curtis who leaned out gruffly demanding: ‘What the ’ell?’
‘Pike here,’ said Curtis’s superintendent. ‘Come down! Urgent!’
Curtis came down. Into the narrow passage Pike pushed his way.
‘Where can we talk?’ he said.
Curtis threw open a door in the right-hand wall of the passage and snapped on a light.
Pike sat in an armchair of curious shape composed, apparently, of bentwood and turkey carpeting. He looked at his subordinate with pleasure, for Curtis, as yet, was completely clothed. Pike said:
‘You’re to come back with me, get out the car and take it straight back to the Yard. Drive like smoke. While you’re starting I’ll ring ’em and tell ’em you’re coming. If necessary, ring Mr Lucas and get authority, but I think I’ll be able to fix that for you before you get there.’ He whipped the notebook again from his waistcoat, tore out a page from it and, as he went on speaking, wrote upon the small paper with a meticulous pencil. He said: ‘What you’ve got to do is to get down here before seven tomorrow morning, thirteen cinematograph cameras with an operator—two, if you like—to each. When I say you’re to bring them down here, I don’t mean it. I mean you’re to take ’em to Batley and stow ’em away there somewhere quiet not showing their cameras and not talking and then ring me. By that time I’ll have got the information I want and I’ll come along and we’ll post ’em … And don’t forget this, my lad: on no account whatsoever, if you value your job or even your bally life, are you to say a word about this stunt inside Holmdale nor are the men you bring down to say a word inside Batley. I don’t care who it is, if it’s the Chief Constable or the Archangel Gabriel, you know nothing. Mind you, I don’t see how you can be asked because nobody knows there’s anything to be asked about, still I’m telling you. Get that?’
Curtis nodded, once.
Pike jerked to his feet. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘Ready to start?’
Again Curtis nodded. But this time he spoke. He said: ‘What’s the stunt, air?’
For an instant, Pike smiled; such a smile as Curtis knew from the past, but had not seen all the time they had been in this place.
‘It’s good!’ said Pike. ‘I want thirteen cinematograph cameras and operators, Curtis, because there are thirteen pillar boxes in this god-forsaken imitation suburb. Don’t you see, Curtis, that the Butcher’s bound to write to us again. And don’t you see, Curtis, that if, as from tomorrow, there’s a secret twenty feet of film taken of every person that posts a letter everywhere, we shall be able to narrow down our field after we’ve got the next Butcher letter.’
A wide replica of his chief’s smile appeared upon Curtis’s face but only to fade almost as soon as it had come. Curtis shook his head. ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ he said, ‘I don’t see it. I thought I did for a minute, but even if we did get pictures of everyone who posts letters on a day when this ’ere Butcher posts a letter, I don’t see how we’re that much better off as you make out, because—’
Pike cut across this speech. ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘be a fool! Even if you didn’t know it, you must’ve realised that by this time I’ve got an arrangement with the postmaster that the postmen making each collection from the boxes put each box’s lot into a separate little bag so that instead of the letters being mixed up together, we know, after every collection, which letters have come out of which box.’
Curtis raised thick, astonished brows. ‘I didn’t know that, sir,’ he said.
Pike snapped at him. ‘Well, you ought to’ve guessed. The only thing that can go wrong with this is if it’s the post-master or one of the postmen who’s the Butcher—then we’re pipped, but it’s a good move. It’s an idea. It’s the best idea I’ve had since I’ve been down here.’ He went to the door. ‘Now get a hat and coat and come along.’