Luke was squatting in a doorway in a narrow, unlighted and stinking alley in the east end of Whitechapel, watching a house which belonged to a widow called Triboff.
To arrive at that spot he had followed a young Russian, whom he had observed hanging round a coffee stall. His name was Tomacoff and he was known to be a messenger for members of the émigré ring. The fact that he was dawdling over his second cup of coffee, with occasional glances at his watch, suggested the possibility that the recipient of his message was not expected to be at home until a late hour. When he had delivered his message, he might be entrusted with a reply. If he could then be followed, he might lead to where another member of the ring was holed up.
Near midnight, with the streets silent and empty, it would not be easy to follow undetected, but it was worth trying. There was a light showing in an upstairs window. From time to time, the shadows of two men moved across it. All he had to do was to wait and make no movement that could be detected from the window.
To help you keep still, had his father not said many years ago, control your thoughts as well as your body. The events of the six years since he had been forced to abandon the road to the Church had certainly given him plenty to think about.
In many ways, the first year had been the hardest.
He had put in a full day at the spinning mills of the brothers Laurent, fetching and carrying for everybody and paid less than anyone. The weekday evenings had been spent in the house of Antoine de Maitre-Huquet, a distant relative of the Laurents newly arrived from France. Here he had consumed his first real meal of the day and for an hour or more the two young men had talked to each other, first in English, then in French, correcting each other’s grammar as they went. After which he had bicycled the six miles back to Bellingham. It was often after midnight before he reached his bed.
So for five days in the week. At the weekends, his father had expected him to help with the manifold jobs around Sir George’s preserves and coverts. Whilst so engaged, he had contrived to avoid meeting Sir George, or his sons. He was helped by the fact that Oliver was away for much of the time, either at school or, later, at Cambridge, while Julian was rarely at home, pursuing a course of political self-education in Germany and Spain.
After a year Antoine had decided that there was not much more he could teach Luke who was, by that time, a competent French conversationalist, with little grammar but an expanding vocabulary. So ended Act One. Act Two had been different and in some ways easier.
A Russian tutor had been located. This time it was not to be informal conversation, but steady professional coaching, which would have to be paid for. Luke had saved a certain amount from his Lavenham pay and his father had insisted, despite his protests, on supplying the deficiency out of his own pocket. Knowing what he did about his father’s finances, it had sometimes occurred to him to wonder where the money was coming from.
Living at home, with two or three hours of solid coaching every afternoon, he had made rapid progress. Commenting on this, his tutor had repeated what the Rector had observed, that his pupil seemed to have a natural aptitude for tuning in to the rhythm of a new language, something akin to an inborn talent for music. So rapid had been his progress that he was soon able to read and enjoy the books that he was given for homework. Sergei Aksakov’s Chronicles of a Russian Family and The Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson, plain fare, but nourishing; then to more exciting stuff. Ivan Goncharov’s The Precipice and Nikolay Gogol’s Taras Bulba with its account of the doings of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
In the course of this study and particularly in Goncharov’s novel, which deals with the traumatic introduction of a nihilist into a conventional family of Russian gentry, he had found that he was imbibing something quite apart from the story. It was a matter of feeling.
From the French books, most of them nineteenth-century reminiscences of life in Paris, he had concluded that, in spite of their revolution, the French had, quickly and thankfully, reverted to a caste system. It was encapsulated, for his tutor Antoine, in the possession of the precious ‘de’. ‘You will perceive,’ he had said, ‘that although we have no aristocrats in France, we still value the concept of aristocracy.’ The Russians, on the other hand, did still have their Tsar, with his satellite court, supported by a landowning over-class. But, underneath it, he could feel the passions stirring; passions that had burst out, even as he was reading, in flame and blood on the decks of the battleship Potemkin and down the Odessa Steps. Flames ruthlessly extinguished, but burning all the hotter for being confined underground.
On one occasion towards the end of the second year, his father had brought back from shooting Dr Ramsden, the head of Lavenham Grammar School, a prestigious grant-aided establishment. Luke remembered him coming into the cottage, looking round cautiously as though suspecting owls in the rafters or rats under the floorboards. He had refused a chair, maybe fearing that if he sat down he would be committing himself too far and had listened, standing in front of the fire, to Hezekiah’s enthusiastic account of his son’s progress. After which he had offered them his advice.
Luke, he considered, ought to start at the foot of the ladder, seeking a post in some small church school. He should be able to secure such a position without great difficulty, particularly if backed by a recommendation from the vicar. What use fluent Russian would be to village children was not immediately apparent, but Luke, who was growing older and wiser, had confined himself to agreeing with every word that Dr Ramsden had uttered.
This was easy, since, as has been noted, he had no intention of becoming a school master.
His secret ambition had been planted, years earlier, by a bundle of dog-eared copies of the Strand magazine. Here he had stumbled into the colourful, the ensnaring world of Sherlock Holmes; of Baker Street, Dr Watson, hansom cabs and pea-soup fogs. His only objection to them was that the official police force seemed to be unduly depreciated. Inspector Hopkins was sometimes approved of. Lestrade, on the other hand, seemed to grab the wrong end of the stick with masterly regularity. It was all very well for Sherlock Holmes. The author dealt him all the cards. Luke thought that in a number of the cases he could have done as well as Holmes himself.
Was that someone looking out of the window? Surely the curtain had shifted. Or were his eyes beginning to play tricks? As the moments went by and a further quarter struck from a nearby clock he relaxed and resumed his thinking.
It was on his eighteenth birthday that he had finally revealed to his father what his plans were. His father had accepted this change of direction with unexpected composure. It was almost as though the thought of his son as a humble usher had ceased to appeal to him, too. A few mornings later, he had driven Luke in the trap to Ipswich and, after making sure that he had enough money for his immediate needs, had said goodbye to him, swung the trap round and clattered off without looking back.
Arrived in London, Luke had presented himself at the recruiting office of the Metropolitan Police. This had turned out to be a cold and dusty room in the corner of Scotland Place. Most of the other recruits seemed to be ex-soldiers, with the army polish still on them.
The intelligence test, so-called, had been a farce. The physical examination which followed had proved an ordeal. The recollection of being forced to strip naked and to submit to a police surgeon pawing his body, still had the power to upset him. The other recruits had taken it in their stride; no doubt their army experience had hardened them to indignities.
That same afternoon he had been sworn in as a constable and posted to ‘L’ Division, where he was billeted in a station house and shared a room with three other recruits. He was allocated a sergeant for the first few weeks as guide, philosopher and friend.
Sergeant Hamble had completed over forty years of service and could offer him little in the way of up-to-date advice. He despised the modern police helmet and spoke warmly of the top hat he had worn as a recruit. ‘Lined with best quality steel,’ he said. ‘You could sit on it if you were tired and stand on it if you wanted to look over some wall or fence. Couldn’t do that with the modern helmet, now, could you?’ He also considered that the rattle was better than the whistle that had replaced it.
In his dreams Luke sometimes saw the sergeant, his top hat at a rakish angle, advancing down the street whirring his rattle like a demented football fan. But such gleams of humour were few and far between in an existence that seemed to be uniformly and unendingly grey.
That he was lonely was natural. He was exchanging a place where he had known and been known by everyone for a place where no one knew him or cared anything about him. This might have been anticipated and in his heart of hearts he suspected that it was good for him. He had to learn to stand on his own feet. What had really upset him was the lack of action and movement.
Of all the divisions in London, ‘L’ had seemed the least exciting. It was neither one thing nor the other. Not a countrified division, like ‘P’ or ‘R’ which ran south into the fields and woods of Kent; nor a central division like ‘M’, which lay immediately to the north of them with one end just across the river from Westminster (‘the Government is vitally concerned by this development, Mr Holmes. Any help you can give will be much appreciated’), the other end embracing the garish riverside of Rotherhithe and Jamaica Road, the land of W. W. Jacobs.
And what had ‘L’ got to offer, for God’s sake?
Clapham, Brixton, Camberwell, Peckham. Places as dull as their names; places full of dull people, the cycle of whose lives seemed to be Saturday night drunkenness and Sunday morning repentance.
Nor had the situation been improved by the character and disposition of his superior officers. The division had been headed by Superintendent Garforth, the plain-clothes men were under Divisional Detective Inspector Cridland. The two men loathed each other. What time they could spare from inter-departmental fighting was spent in keeping the lower ranks in their place.
When Garforth learned that Luke was competent in French and fluent in Russian his first reaction was to distrust him. The next was to make use of him in the most tedious manner possible. There were court documents that needed translation and for the whole of one week, he had been loaned to a neighbouring division to take down everything that was said at an Anglo-French trade conference, translating into English any comments made. His thirty-two-page report went into Garforth’s desk and, Luke was certain, never saw the light of day again.
It was at the end of that particular week, at the darkest hour of his depression, that the clouds lifted. Joe Narrabone arrived. And better still, he and Joe had managed to get a room to themselves. Joe had been at the village school with Luke. He had been no sort of scholar, regarding the study of books as a waste of precious time. He had a genius for getting into trouble and wriggling out of it. He had been unquestionably, and with no near rival, the bad boy of the village.
Standing behind the form mistress, who was covering his exercise book with corrections, he had spent his time attaching the end of her skirt to the chair she was sitting on; so firmly that, the other boys being too weak with laughter to help her, the poor lady had been forced to hobble into the next-door classroom, dragging the chair with her, to report the outrage to the headmaster. This had earned Joe a record flogging, which he had repaid by climbing into the headmaster’s bedroom carrying a sack with a dead dog in it. As he explained to Luke with a gap-toothed grin, he had arranged the dog in the bed, with its head tastefully exposed on the pillow.
He was suspected of this outrage, but nothing could be proved.
His elders and betters had prophesied fates for Joe ranging from transportation to the gallows, but he had been unimpressed. Luke, being his total opposite in character, had naturally become his closest friend, a friendship which had produced one practical advantage. Joe had poached, consistently and successfully, in all coverts except those belonging to Sir George.
After leaving school, Joe had continued his career of rowdy misconduct and petty crime; until, as he explained to Luke, he got reformed.
‘T’wasn’t religion nor nothing like that,’ he explained. ‘Fact is, I got cotched selling pheasants I’d picked up. Told the beak I’d found them in the road, but somehow he diddun believe me. Result was, I got a proper whipping. Oh boy, don’t you ever try it. At school all they did was tickle you. This hurt. I diddun want no more of it. So I made up my mind. You know what they say – if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And here I am.’ He had added, sitting on the bed drumming his boots on the floor, ‘At school you was always held up to me as a good example. A sort of saint, with one of those custard pie things round your head.’
At this point Luke had thrown a pillow at him and they had rolled on to the floor, trying to hold each other down. The noise had brought in Sergeant Hamble who had separated them and lectured them on the virtue of co-operation.
‘I don’t know what you boys was quarrelling about, but whatever it was, you must make it up and try to be friends.’ They had promised to try and when the sergeant had departed had lain on their beds almost ill with suppressed laughter.
From that point life had started again.
They had managed to get posted to the same patrol and had quartered the streets of Clapham, Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham looking for some excitement in those depressingly unexciting parts of London.
It had arrived unexpectedly.
One morning the sergeant who was briefing them had told them to keep a particular eye on a meeting at the Brixton Town Hall. ‘It’s them wimmin,’ he said, speaking the bi-syllable as though it was synonymous with ‘vermin’. ‘I expect you’ve read about ‘em in the papers. Suffrajetters they call themselves.’
Recently Luke had picked up a paper which had intrigued him by its slashing cover picture. This showed a young lady equipped with a sword called ‘Equity’ and a shield labelled ‘Purity’. She had need of both of them, since she was being pounced on by a dragon with scaly wings and long claws identified as ‘The Press’. He noted that it was the official organ of the Woman’s Social and Political Union, which had achieved notoriety as the militant branch of a more decorous body, the National Suffrage Union. It was the WSPU, it seemed, who were organising this particular meeting. The brainchild of the Pankhurst family from Manchester, their battle-cry proclaimed their aims: ‘Women, speak out. No pulling of punches. Fight. Suffer if you must, but never, never keep quiet.’
‘I dunno what they call themselves now,’ said the sergeant. ‘They keep changing their names. But I can tell you what I call ‘em. I call ‘em trouble. This meeting’s to raise money. What for? Why, so’s they can make more trouble. Watch ‘em close. If you see a breach of the peace, you know what to do.’ What exactly this was he had left unexplained.
Luke and Joe had rearranged their beats so that they met behind the Town Hall, a gaunt yellow building overlooking the railway on one side and a canal on the other. The noise inside the building reminded Luke of a hive of bees getting ready to swarm. As he was thinking this, the noise increased, in tempo and in pitch. Not bees. Hornets.
‘Something’s happening round the side,’ said Joe. They doubled back the way they had come. As they turned the corner, a door burst open and a man staggered out. His shirt was torn open at the neck and his face was running with blood. As he hesitated, undecided which way to turn, the furies on his heels caught him.
The young lady who was leading the pack dived for his ankles like an expert rugby footballer. The two who were following her piled on top of him, clawing and scratching.
Breach of the peace, thought Luke. What do we do now? The idea of attacking a well-dressed and clearly upper-class young woman was unappealing. By the time he reached the point of action, half a dozen more had come out and formed a circle round the trio on the ground. Some were shouting, others were offering advice. They were divided between a suggestion that the man be thrown on to the railway line or, alternatively, into the canal.
‘Must stop this,’ said Luke. He caught hold of one of the women in a half-hearted way, and tried to pull her off her prey. She was unexpectedly strong. While she was resisting, two of her friends had grabbed him, one by the collar, the other by the hair. He felt that in a short time, he would be on the ground himself.
The situation was saved by Joe. He was a great deal less inhibited than Luke. He hit one of the women who was attacking him with an upper-cut which felled her, and he dealt with the two on top of the man by banging their heads together hard. Then he advanced on the crowd of supporters, kicking them on the shins and stamping on their feet. This was more effective than punching.
Luke, meanwhile, had helped the victim to his feet. Reinforcements were pouring out of the door. A tactical withdrawal was indicated.
He and Joe each grabbed one of the man’s arms and they ran for it – down the side alley, through an open gate and along the canal bank. Joe paused once, to knock the closest of their pursuers into the canal, a move which conferred a double benefit on them, since the rest of the pack halted to rescue their friend and the pursuit slackened.
They crossed the canal via a bridge, dived down an alley and emerged into a side road.
‘Pub here,’ said Joe.
He thundered on the door, which opened after a clanking of bolts and was shut and bolted behind them. It was a middle-aged lady who had let them in. Luke supposed that Joe knew her, since when he put one arm round her waist and kissed her, she offered no objection to this treatment, but clucked with concern when she saw the state of the victim’s face and bustled off for hot water and sponges. By the time she got back he seemed to be better.
‘I’ll have that jacket,’ the lady said. ‘Sooner we get the blood off it the better. And put some of this on them scratches.’ It was a bottle of yellow stuff labelled ‘Poison’. When Luke looked at it doubtfully she said, ‘I keep it in the bar to use on my customers. Not killed one of them yet.’
She made off with the jacket and the man submitted to having his face dabbed.
‘If it stings,’ said Luke, who had been brought up on this well-known medical theory, ‘it’s a sign that it’s doing you good.’
‘Looks like a Red Indian, dunnee,’ said Joe critically. ‘A new sort. A Yellow Indian. He could do with a bit more on the chin.’
By the time they had finished painting, the landlady was back with the coat, which she had roughly sponged and pressed, a bottle of brandy and four glasses.
The man said, ‘It wasn’t only the scratches.’ He felt the back of his head. ‘I got quite a bump there when I went down.’
‘If you were concussed,’ said Luke, ‘I don’t think you ought to drink alcohol.’
‘That’s a fallacy,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve been concussed more times than you’ve had hot dinners and brandy’s the only thing that done it any good.’
While the man was sipping his brandy cautiously, with pauses to make sure that it wasn’t doing him any harm, Luke said, ‘We ought to introduce ourselves. We’re the latest thing in recruits. I’m Probationary Constable Pagan and this is Probationary Constable Narrabone. Both of “L” Division. We haven’t been here long enough to know everyone by sight. You’d be in the Detective Branch, of course.’
‘The aristocrats,’ said Joe, ‘compared with us poor foot sloggers, that is.’
‘Actually,’ said the man, ‘I’m not in “L” Division.’ He paused for a moment as though deliberating whether to go on, then he added, ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not a policeman. I’m working at the Home Office. I was sent to report on this meeting. I thought I was safely tucked away in a dark corner of the gallery, but those women must have spotted me.’
‘Eyes like cats’,’ agreed Joe.
‘I’m everlastingly grateful to you for what you did,’ said the man. He had hoisted himself to his feet and found that he was tolerably steady on his legs. ‘I’ve got to get back as quickly as I can. Could I ask you a favour? When you make your report, could you leave me out of it as much as possible? Describe me as an innocent member of the public, set on for no reason by those women. Something like that.’
‘Do what we can,’ said Luke. ‘And I’m sure that this lady—’
‘I’m not one to blab,’ said the landlady. ‘And if you must go, though I think you’d be wiser to sit still for a bit, I’ll show you a back way out, in case those creatures are still prowling round.’
While she was gone the two probationary constables sat warming their feet at the fire, sipping their brandy and wondering how long they could make this useful diversion last. ‘One thing I did think a bit odd—’ said Joe.
Hold it. Two men at the window now. Two shadows quite clear on the curtain. They seemed to be looking out. And were they signalling to someone? And if so, who to? Luke felt a trickle of apprehension at the thought. The alley-way was a dead end running up to the railway. No one had gone past him since he arrived, so whoever it was, was either up on the railway or, more probably and more disturbingly, had got there before him and had been standing as still as he had been.
It was some minutes before he could detach his thoughts from this unpleasant possibility and bring them back to the story that he was telling himself. It was worth the effort, because he remembered that Joe had said something important.
‘One thing I do think a bit odd,’ he had said. ‘We told him our names, didn’t we? OK. So why didn’t he tell us his?’
‘Perhaps he’s in the Secret Service.’
‘He wouldn’t be in no service at all if we hadn’t been there to lend him a hand.’
The landlady, who was back by now, having seen her guest safely away through the cellar-flap, said, ‘Did I understand that you was wanting to know something about him? Well, I can tell you this much. His name’s Hubert Daines and he lives at 173B Cromwell Road.’
‘How on earth—?’
‘Couldn’t resist taking a peep in his jacket pocket. Found two or three letters addressed to him.’
Luke made a careful note of both the name and the address. In view of what they had promised, they could not use them when they made their report, but he had a feeling that they might come in handy sooner or later.
The landlady waved aside Luke’s offer to pay for the drinks. ‘He paid for them,’ she said. ‘Paid up handsome.’ They finished their own drinks quickly. Although they had an excellent excuse for having left their beats they felt they might have stretched it a bit far.
‘Have to talk fast,’ said Joe, ‘to talk ourselves out of this.’
He was right.
They had missed two points and were reported, reluctantly, by Sergeant Hamble. Their account of an unnamed bystander whom they had rescued from the hands of the suffragettes, had been received with cynicism. It appeared that, after the ejection of the spy, the meeting had closed with a number of resolutions advocating varying degrees of violence and had then dispersed peacefully. The organisers denied all knowledge of intrusion by a spy.
Luke and Joe were warned that they would face a disciplinary board, at Area level, which, since they were still only probationers, might mean dismissal from the Force.
At this point, when things looked black for the two young constables, a letter had arrived. Addressed to Superintendent Garforth, it was typed on a double sheet of handsomely embossed Home Office notepaper and signed by no less a person than an Under-secretary of State. It congratulated the Superintendent on the measures he had taken to keep a potentially dangerous meeting under observation and control. It applauded the vigorous steps taken by his officers in protecting a member of the Home Office staff from assault and damage and said that the whole episode reflected great credit on Garforth and on the organisation at his division. The Under-secretary would be sending a copy of his letter to the Home Secretary.
Luke and Joe were now wheeled up for a second helping. The letter was read out to them and they were told that, in all the circumstances, their offence of missing two consecutive points could be overlooked – provided that it did not occur again.
Luke had derived two impressions from all this: that Hubert Daines must have an unexpected pull with the senior ranks in the Home Office; and that he was a very shrewd man.
A second episode was imprinted on Luke’s memory, as much for the uneasiness which it had caused him at the time as for its unexpected outcome. It had occurred eighteen months after his and Joe’s brush with the suffragettes.
Their probationary period was long past and they were by then established members of the rank and file of ‘L’ Division. Luke, in spite of a tendency to use words of more than two syllables and to read works of literature in preference to the penny press, was tolerated by his fellow constables on account of his unfailing good nature and generosity. Joe was popular. His skill in evading the consequences of his more outrageous manoeuvres commanded respect among his friends and suspicion among his superiors.
Both of them had acquired a number of commendations and the tiny pecuniary awards which occasionally went with them – money which disappeared immediately in a round of celebratory drinks.
Superintendent Garforth’s view of them was ambivalent. Both were unquestionably good at their jobs and would come up, in due course, for promotion to sergeant. This was a step which neither of them would have viewed with unmixed pleasure. They knew that the real way up was through the ranks of the CID.
Transfer from the uniformed to the plain-clothes branch did not normally occur until after three or four years of service, but in exceptional cases it could be expedited and take place after one complete year. DDI Cridland had early spotted their CID potential and shortly after the conclusion of their first year’s service had approached Superintendent Garforth with the prospect of their transfer. Garforth had immediately, and inevitably, opposed any such move.
It was at this juncture, that the second episode occurred, which Luke remembered, not only for its unpleasant beginning, but for the important results which finally stemmed from it.
One of the local attractions was a courtyard at the bottom of Brixton Hill. It had been taken over by a group of enterprising businessmen who had set up stalls selling all manner of portable property, from costume jewellery and watches to fruit and vegetables. It was usually crowded. The arrangement of ‘Shoppers’ Paradise’, as they had named it, was that you selected your purchases and carried them over to a cashier’s desk in a central booth. The openness of the transaction would have made shoplifting difficult, but the police had been instructed to keep an eye on it.
One morning Luke, who was on duty, observed a young man who seemed to be behaving oddly. He would push through the crowd towards the cashier’s desk, pause there for a moment then, seeming to change his mind, make his way back towards the entrance. He showed no interest in the goods displayed in the stalls and Luke began to wonder what he was up to. The next time he moved into the crowd he followed him cautiously, keeping a few yards from him and a screen of shoppers between them.
Suddenly, and it happened so quickly that he could hardly believe his eyes, he saw the young man’s hand slip into the shopping bag of a lady in front of him and extract her purse. He was about to drop it into his own pocket when Luke, lunging forward, caught hold of his wrist and took the purse from him.
The young man did not resist him, but bellowed out, ‘Take your hands off me, you crazy bluebottle.’
‘That’s right,’ said a bystander, ‘you leave him alone. And what are you doing with that purse, eh?’
At this the young lady swung round and said, ‘That’s my purse. Let me have it back at once.’
‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Luke. ‘It was this young man who stole your purse. I saw him do it.’
‘A pack of lies,’ said the helpful bystander.
‘And I’m charging him with it. I’ll require you and him to come with me to the station.’
‘Don’t go,’ said the helpful bystander. ‘Are we going to let ourselves be trampled on by a Jack-in-office what’s been caught stealing money and is trying to put it on to an innocent man?’
The crowd seemed to be with him and was turning ugly when a second constable appeared. This was PC Farmer, a large and formidable person, and when Luke had rapidly explained the situation to him he said, ‘Right. You come along with us. You and the lady. And that witness. Where is he?’
But the witness had disappeared.
Back at the Station Sergeant Hamble listened, first to Luke and then to the young man, who repeated his story and added that if the police persisted in such a ridiculous charge, he had a number of highly respectable friends who would vouch for him. The sergeant said that if he would give them his own name and address and details of his friends, he would be allowed to depart, being remanded to appear in due course and answer the charge.
The young man thought about this and said, ‘You shall have my name, which is George Taylor. But not my address or the details of my friends. When this insulting charge has been dismissed, as it will be, you will release me and apologise. And I trust,’ he added, eyeing Luke malevolently, ‘that steps will then be taken against the actual thief.’
The sergeant said that if he persisted in refusing his address he would have to be held, in custody, to appear before the magistrate.
This took place on the following morning. The magistrate, Mr Horace Lamb, was shrewd but fair. It was one man’s word against another. The woman was neutral. She had no idea who had taken her purse. The helpful bystander had disappeared and no other witnesses had come forward. As the matter stood it seemed to turn on the character of the accused. If he had indeed led a blameless life, never straying from the straight and narrow path, it seemed incredible that he should have chosen such a public occasion to depart from it. On the other hand, it was equally unlikely that a young policeman should have embarked on a career of crime in such a place and in such a manner. In the end, the magistrate decided to adjourn the hearing for seven days.
‘This will give you time,’ he said to Mr Taylor, ‘to think again about your refusal to identify your family and the friends who will speak for you. You realise, I hope, that their evidence may be decisive.’ Mr Taylor said that his friends would have to be consulted, but he was sure they would speak for him. The magistrate said, ‘Very well,’ and looked at Luke, who had nothing to say.
He was certain that the self-styled George Taylor was a professional thief and that the helpful bystander had been an accomplice. He had a week to prove it. For God’s sake, how did he set about it? Joe said he would ask around and see what he could ferret out. Sergeant Hamble recommended prayer. Luke went up to Scotland Yard and began a desperate search through the photographs in the Rogues’ Gallery.
There were hundreds of photographs. Thousands. Front view, side view, even back view. After a bit they seemed to merge together. They became a composite picture of criminality which haunted him in his sleep. When, on the third day, suddenly and without the least doubt, he found Mr Taylor, he was so relieved that he laughed aloud.
A man who was also studying the photographs turned round and Luke recognised him. It was Detective Inspector Wensley, the DDI of ‘H’ Division. Known throughout the force as Fred and by the criminal population of east London as Vensel or the Weasel, he looked as unlike a senior policeman as it was possible for a man to look. He had a long, white, sad face which sloped down from his forehead to a prominent jaw. His upper lip was adorned by a splendid moustache which made him look more like a walrus than a weasel.
Plucking up courage as he noted the twinkle in Wensley’s deep-set eyes, Luke had poured out the whole story.
‘Good,’ said Wensley. ‘I had a very similar experience myself during my early days in Whitechapel. It’s a common ploy among the light-fingered gentry. If I might suggest it, your next step should be to examine the man’s record. If he’s a professional criminal there will certainly be previous convictions.’
Luke said he had thought of this, but would the rules allow him to bring them to the magistrate’s attention?
‘There’s an answer to that,’ Wensley said. ‘Not, perhaps, strictly legal, but very effective. I take it you will be conducting your own defence? Good. You’ll do it much better than the sort of third-class barrister you could afford. Records of previous offences are on dark blue paper. I’ll assume you find one or more of them. You hold them in your hand in such a way that the prisoner can see them and you say to him, “You are aware, I take it, that lying on oath is a crime, for which you can be severely punished. So I want to ask you one question. You have based your defence on your good character, so I’m entitled to ask you whether you have ever been convicted of a criminal offence.” He’ll be a very bold man if he doesn’t say “yes”. Then you can rub it in. How many times and what for? I’m sure I can leave it to you.’
His confidence was not misplaced. Taylor, real name Abrahams, was convicted of attempted theft and Luke received a commendation.
Wensley, who was in court when this happy conclusion was reached, had taken him aside afterwards to congratulate him. What followed seemed predestined. As soon as he discovered that Luke was a fluent Russian speaker, he had applied his considerable weight to effect what Luke had been praying for, both for himself and Joe. A transfer to the Detective Branch and a transfer to ‘H’ Division. Superintendent Garforth had fought hard to retain Luke, but his opposition had been steam-rollered. Opposition to Joe’s departure had been a good deal less strenuous.
This had all happened six months ago and Luke had had time to appreciate why, in the eyes of the Force, the ‘H’ in ‘H’ Division (which embraced Stepney, Whitechapel and Poplar) stood for Horror. Notwithstanding the dangers and difficulties he had enjoyed life enormously.
Hold it. The door of the house he was watching was being opened, cautiously. Someone was going to come out. Was coming out. He craned forward, and the movement saved him. A blow, which would have fallen squarely on his head, fell instead on his left forearm. He whipped round, got his right arm round his attacker’s neck and pulled him down.
Footsteps running up and a rain of blows from his new attacker. A lot of them fell on his opponent as they rolled together on the ground. Then a crack on the forehead which dazed him.
When the mist had cleared a little he levered himself up on to his knees. He could hear two sets of footsteps running away round the corner and disappearing into the distance. He was in no shape to follow. His left arm felt as though it didn’t belong to him, his head was still spinning. He felt sick.
He was sick.
This restored him sufficiently for him to get to his feet and stagger towards the only destination that mattered – his bed. As he went, there were two thoughts in his mind. The first was that there was something wrong with his arm. Something very wrong. And it wasn’t only his arm, now. His legs were misbehaving. As they buckled under him and he went down face first into the gutter there was another quite independent thought in his mind. There had been something odd about the second set of footsteps. Something he ought to remember.