Beresford broke out of the mental paralysis which had gripped him after Arran’s bald statement, but his voice was harsh and unnatural, and his limbs were still tensed.
“No chance at all?” he demanded.
“I can’t see any,” said Arran.
Beresford pulled himself together with a physical effort.
“Listen, Tim,” he said. “Go to Marshant at the Embassy, tell him I sent you and that it’s the same game as I saw him about yesterday. Tell him to get the Sûreté moving quicker than it’s ever moved before, and to find the crowd who fired that nursing-home if it’s the last thing they do. Got that?”
“All right,” said Arran, who sounded lifeless. “Anything else?”
“No, but get back to London, with Toby, on the first ’plane. I’ve something here to keep you busy.”
“All right,” said Arran again. “Chin-chin.”
Beresford dropped the telephone on to its platform, and turned round towards Josiah Long. Josiah Long was a nuisance now. He was in the way, and for the time being he couldn’t be trusted.
“Buddy,” said Beresford laconically, “I’ve got a nasty shock coming for you.”
“Yeah?” Long’s eyes widened, and for once he did not blink. “Let’s have it, big boy.”
“I’m going to jail you,” said Beresford. “Sorry, but it can’t be helped. I’ll let you out at once when I get an O.K. from the powers-that-be. Ready?”
Josiah Long, his full lips pursed thoughtfully, heaved himself from his chair and reached for his hat, which was on the table. He was about to speak, but the kitchen door opened suddenly and Tricker, still bandaged, poked his head into the room.
“When’ll you eat, Mr. B.?”
“Sam,” said Beresford, drawing a deep breath, “I don’t know when and I don’t know where. Is that guardian angel of yours coming here to-night.”
“Wot, Maria, Mr. B.? I——”
“Anyhow,” grunted Beresford, “even if she is she isn’t. This place isn’t likely to be healthy to-night, Sam. Stay here yourself until Horace Miller or one of the Arrans comes, and then take your pet to the pictures. Deliver her afterwards to her home, Sam, and then park yourself at a temperance hotel for the night. Do you get that?”
“You don’t want me to stay here to-night, Mr. B.?”
“I don’t, Sam, unless you want to take a chance on getting a bigger wallop than you had the other night.”
“O.K., Mr. B.”
Beresford grinned fleetingly, then slipped into a mackintosh, and escorted Mr. Josiah Long out of the flat. As they climbed into the Lancia, still standing at the kerb, the big man grinned again, but there was a whimsical gleam in his grey eyes.
“You’re taking it all very calmly, O Josiah.”
The American grunted.
“I got to,” he said logically. “If I make a break for it, I’ll have a posse of yo’ cops on my tail, and dat won’t give me my dinner. How long,” he added, as the Lancia moved off, “will it be before you can give me a pass out? Days or weeks?”
“Hours, with any luck,” said Beresford. “I’ll get a call through to Washington and have a talk with your boss—what’s his name?”
“Yuh just say who you’re asking about,” said Long cautiously.
Beresford grunted, and swung the car into Bond Street, turning right towards Piccadilly and zig-zagging through the traffic until he turned into Whitehall. He pulled up outside Scotland Yard, and Josiah Long opened the door and climbed out.
“I ain’t never been in here,” he started. “I——”
But Beresford didn’t hear what he was going to say.
The big man was sliding along the seats to get out of the Lancia on the on-side of the car, and he was looking at the long bonnet. As he looked, the bonnet seemed to bulge outwards. For a split second Beresford saw that crazy bulging, and then with a bellow of warning he dropped below the dashboard, squeezing himself as low as possible. Even as he moved, and as Josiah Long, with astonishing agility, skipped away from the car, the bonnet burst with a deep-toned roar which filled Whitehall with rumbling echoes, making a thousand people stop dead in their tracks. Yellow sheets of flame shot upwards and outwards, and the engine of the Lancia burst into a thousand pieces which went into the air like a cloud of shrapnel.
People shouted, women screamed, men swore. The flames developed into a roaring inferno, gaining a hold with frightening rapidity. About Whitehall, pieces of steel and iron thudded against the pavement, into the macadam-topped surface of the road, against the walls of the great buildings on either side. Windows went inwards, shivering beneath the impact of those pieces. The driver of a London Transport omnibus, turning his head instinctively towards the explosion, was met full face with a flying piece of steel which smashed into his eyes. The man screamed, and his hands left the wheel. The bus skidded, crashing into a small car and squashing it against a wall; of the driver of the car there was nothing but a stomach-turning wreckage. The din of shrieking passengers added to the bedlam, and the bus rocked to and fro, as if it must crash over on one side; but it righted itself miraculously, although its windows were splintered and fire started in its engine.
And all the while the flames about the Lancia grew more vicious, and the front part of the chassis was white-hot metal.
Tony Beresford, squashed down beneath the dashboard, caught between the wood of it and the upholstery of the seats, contracted his muscles all he could, but was ready to see death. It seemed to leer at him, but it passed him by. Head first, he wriggled out of the Lancia, through the door which Josiah Long had left open, and willing hands dragged him to safety in the teeth of the flames.
Superintendent Horace Miller leaned against the window of the Police Commissioner’s office at Scotland Yard, while Sir William Fellowes, who until recently had been unique as a Commissioner of Police without a title, sat at his desk and listened grimly to Tony Beresford.
Fellowes was a stony-faced man who looked incapable of humour but was in fact a specialist in dry and caustic wit. At that moment, however, there was no humour on his lips nor in his hard grey eyes.
“We’ve got to get Gorman on some charge or other,” said Beresford, and it seemed to him that he had been saying that at regular intervals for the past four days. It was like a refrain in his mind. If they could only hold Gorman, they would have time to breathe, time to catch up with the man’s game, time to smash it. But while he was free he was two moves ahead of Beresford and Department Z and the police. “Can’t you get him on a small count of some kind?” Beresford demanded. “If we could only work without him on our tails for twelve hours we might get through.”
Fellowes drummed on his desk with his fingers.
“No,” he said. “I can’t touch Leopold Gorman. Craigie asked me to this morning, and he saw Mannering——”
(Sir David Mannering was the then Premier.)
“What did Mannering say?” Beresford asked.
“He said,” muttered Fellowes, hard-voiced, “that if we tried to hold Gorman on any charge that we couldn’t prove up to the hilt, we’d smash ourselves. Gorman’s not in this on his own, Beresford; he’s got powerful backing, and we can’t touch him—yet.”
Beresford swore.
“Where is Craigie? Do you know?”
“No idea,” said Fellowes.
“I spoke to him when you telephoned,” Miller interjected from the window. “That’s the last we saw or heard of him. An hour and a half ago now, and he’s not been to your flat yet—I telephoned five minutes ago.”
Beresford pushed his hand through his hair. He was pale, grimy from his contact with the burning Lancia, and his right hand was badly burned. At that moment he was prepared to believe the worst about anything, and to be pessimistic as to the reason for Craigie’s ‘disappearance’.
“You can’t call it that yet,” said Fellowes. “He might have gone over to Paris, after learning about the fire.”
“Arran couldn’t get at him to tell him,” grunted Beresford.
“Craigie learns things from more than one source,” said the Commissioner. “God, Tony, you’re not getting beaten by it, are you?”
Just for a moment the two men stared at each other, hard-eyed. Fellowes knew his man, and knew, too, that the Valerie Lester element had not helped Beresford to keep his mind clear. But he expected what he got. Beresford’s eyes lost their stoniness, and his lips curved.
“Sez you!” said Beresford. “All right, Bill—thanks.”
Fellowes smiled, and proffered cigarettes.
“We ought to get the call through from New York at any time,” he said. “If Long’s O.K. that’ll be a big help.”
Beresford said nothing, but thought of the American with mixed feelings. Certainly Long had saved him from the machine-gun affray, but the little (not so little, Beresford corrected himself; Long’s guise as a middle-aged and somewhat corpulent bachelor made him look shorter than his five-feet-nine) American was what he would probably have called ‘in it bad’ with Leopold Gorman and that powerful financier’s ‘big shots’.
Prior to his visit to Chelsea, Beresford had not been attacked since the first night’s escapades in Auveley Street. In the five hours since he had seen Long for the first time to know him as Josiah, there had been the machine-gun outrage and the Lancia trick. That meant, Beresford reasoned, that Gorman was prepared to do anything rather than allow the Englishman and the American to join forces. Singly they were dangerous; together, thought Beresford, Gorman considered them an even greater threat to his immunity from trouble. The big man wondered what would be the result of the wireless-telephone inquiry concerning Josiah Long which had been put through to New York by Sir William Fellowes, and which New York Headquarters had promised to answer as quickly as they could make inquiries at Washington. Would the result confirm Long’s apparent genuineness?
Beresford was waiting for the reply from New York with more anxiety than either of the others realized. The result of that message would explain many things to him, but just then he was not prepared to pass his theories on to Bill Fellowes or the phlegmatic Horace Miller.
A telephone-bell whirred out suddenly, and Beresford’s eyes widened. Fellowes shook his head as he heard the voice at the other end of the wire.
“From Jennings,” he said, as he replaced the receiver. (Jennings was a police expert on arson.) “About your Lancia.”
“Dodo Trale’s Lancia,” grinned Beresford. “What’s the report?”
“He’s coming here to tell us,” said Fellowes.
Jennings arrived—a small, sallow-faced man with a wall-eye. A rogue to look at, Beresford grinned to himself, if ever there was one. He spoke with obvious knowledge, however, and even his low-pitched voice demanded respect.
“I don’t think there’s much doubt as to how the thing started, sir.” Jennings spoke to Fellowes while looking every now and again at Beresford. “An asbestos container holding nitro-glycerine was fastened to the inside of the radiator. The container was sealed, but became unsealed after some manipulation, and the heat of the engine—or a spark—sent the engine sky-high. That’s all, sir.”
“All!” muttered Beresford. “I should say it was a whale of a lot! But how was the container opened?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Jennings. “The container itself is hardly damaged, but the lever or wire which was used to open it is burnt. I’d imagine,” he added, taking courage from Fellowes’ nod, “that the thing was timed to open after you had applied the foot and handbrakes, sir.”
“Not the door?” Miller snapped the question from the window. Horace Miller was frequently wide awake when he looked asleep.
“I shouldn’t imagine so,” said Jennings, turning towards the Super. “The door might have been opened and closed several times while the car was still standing—I mean, before it was put into motion after the trap had been set. So the container would have opened earlier——”
“Possibly before Mr. Beresford got in,” muttered Miller.
“Or the other gentleman,” said Jennings, thinking of Josiah Long, who at that moment was in Jennings’ office, waiting patiently for the report from America.
“Ye-es,” Beresford said, after a pause. “Besides, the engine wouldn’t have been hot enough at the start of the journey, and the door would have been opened and shut before I started the engine—or it might have been.”
“Exactly,” said Jennings, eyeing Beresford with fresh respect.
“All right, Jennings,” the Commissioner said, after a pause. “Keep at it, though. If you can find just how the container was operated it might help a lot.”
Jennings did not say that the mechanism of the trap had been blown sky-high, and that even if it had not been burned it was probably littering Whitehall. He went out of the office quietly. Beresford started to speak, but the telephone-bell cut into his words.
Fellowes took the instrument up quickly. The expression on his face told the other two men that it was the New York call. They waited, eager-eyed, for the conversation to finish. Beresford’s, “Well?” and Miller’s, “Is he all right?” were snapped out simultaneously, before the telephone was replaced.
Fellowes nodded, picked up another receiver and muttered, “Send Mr. Long up here,” into the mouthpiece. Then:
“Long’s story’s true,” he said. “He’s on a special commission to investigate the source of the Wheat Pool mystery, as well as some killings which New York reckons were planned in England. He’s got two men and two women with him—all regular agents. Valerie Lester,” he added, with a grin at Beresford, “is one of them. She’s been on the Wheat Pool job for some time.”
Beresford grinned back, relieved. Miller grunted.
“What Wheat Pool business is it, sir?”
“Someone in England’s buying up Wheat Pool interests,” said Beresford, “and America doesn’t want control of the Pool to leave the country. We’d feel the same,” he added.
Bill Fellowes grunted.
“It isn’t the financial part that’s the trouble,” he said. “If Gorman—and they think it’s Gorman, because he’s the only man big enough to tackle it—wants to buy, no one can stop him. But whoever is buying isn’t satisfied with ‘no’ for an answer. If a man won’t sell——”
“He kicks the bucket,” muttered Beresford, “and his holdings go to someone who will sell. That’s what Long told me. Is that what you got?”
“Yes,” said Fellowes, and paused as someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” he called.
Mr. Josiah Long, heralded by a uniformed constable, entered the office. He looked, at first, anxious and nervous, but Beresford had learned not to connect his weak, blinking eyes with nerves. A glance at Beresford’s face, however, satisfied the American special agent. He grinned, and went through his pockets for his Camels (Beresford guessed), and the big man grinned when he saw a packet of Player’s, familiar with their bearded sailor jacket.
“Run out of stock?” asked the big man, and Long grimaced and nodded. “Anyhow—we’re going to believe you, O Josiah.”
“Dat’s good hearing,” said Josiah Long cheerfully. “I thought maybe dey wouldn’t want to talk on de udder side. Howso—what are yuh buddies goner do?”
“Get Gorman,” said Beresford.
“Sho’ thing. But how?”
“Listen,” said Beresford, and for the next half an hour he talked, interrupted occasionally by Long’s nasal questions, or Fellowes’ dry, “Don’t forget this,” or Miller’s stolid, “You can try, but ...” Nevertheless, all three men were impressed, and Josiah Long made no bones about saying so.
There was one way, as Beresford had explained, by which Leopold Gorman might be tripped up and his connection with the murders and attacks proved. But before he put the method to the test, Tony Beresford wanted to see and talk with his Chief. Discipline was strong in Department Z, and Beresford had no desire to break the rules. On the other hand, unless Craigie turned up soon, Beresford would have to put his plan into motion.
It was nearly nine o’clock when the big man left Scotland Yard, unaccompanied by Josiah Long, who was still talking with the Police Commissioner and the Super. Craigie’s office had been telephoned several times, his Brook Street flat, as well as the eating-house in Villiers Street which he occasionally patronized for its grill. But there was no trace of Gordon Craigie, no message, no word of any kind.
Beresford was more worried than he had admitted to the policemen. More than they, he realized the extreme care with which Craigie always worked. It was a thousand to one against the possibility of the Chief having gone off on some obscure—or for that matter plain—trail without leaving a message behind for Beresford, who was keeping in constant touch. The big man wondered, not without a tightening of his lips, whether Craigie was safe. Gorman was probably fully aware that the Chief of Department Z was his most dangerous opponent. Craigie had influence, and if it came to a showdown between Gorman’s influence and the Chief’s, Gorman would probably lose; the financier would go to the absolute limit to clip Craigie’s wings—and Gorman’s limit was death.
As he walked to his flat, Beresford let his mind run again. The Paris development had been sizzling in his brain from the moment that he had heard from Timothy Arran, but he wanted to keep away from the subject of the nursing-home fire until he had talked with the Arrans, who would be in London before midnight. The incidents in Auveley Street and the remarkable affair of the Lancia demanded a hearing too. The machine-gun episode, while lurid, was understandable. The Lancia affair was not. Beresford tried to puzzle it out as he walked towards the Carilon Club, where he had it in mind to do many things.
The Lancia had been tampered with, almost for certain, while it had been standing outside the flat in Auveley Street. During the three-quarters of an hour that Beresford had been at Number 7, the asbestos container, with its nitro-glycerine contents, had been fastened to the radiator or inside the Lancia’s bonnet, and the trap had been rigged up to ensure that the container was opened while Beresford was in the car. All that time, Beresford told himself, there had been crowds outside Number 7, because of the machine-gun sensation, and there had been at least three policemen. Whoever had done the job had done it quickly, and without attracting attention.
Beresford walked along the Mall towards the Carilon Club, twice cursing himself for a fool when he fancied that two pedestrians seemed to show more interest in him than they should have done. Beresford was—or had been until then—a stranger to nerves. The affair which had started so innocently, so far as Beresford was directly concerned, that night at the Two-Step Club, was playing havoc with him. Things happened, out of the blue. He reminded himself, with a twisted smile, of his little harangue to Timothy Arran. Death was always round the corner ...
The two pedestrians, however, had no designs on him, and Beresford turned into the Carilon, relieved by its sobriety, the dozen or so men who ‘halloed’ him as he went towards the bar, and glad to see one Dodo Trale, Agent Seven of Department Z, whose job—happily, said Trale—was to follow up the Adele Fayne contact with Leopold Gorman. At that moment he was drinking beer, and he asked Beresford, cheerfully, to join him.
“Tankards—two,” said Dodo Trale, as Beresford nodded. “I’ve been expecting to see you, Tony. I——Now what the blazes is making you so green, drat you?”
That was an exaggeration, but Beresford, who was looking over a member’s shoulder at an Evening Echo, was certainly looking grim. For the Echo’s headline was:
TWOPENCE RISE IN PETROL PRICES
Beresford seemed to see the sloping shoulders, the uneven face of Leopold Gorman as he read the line. The price ramp had started!