In Which I Go Back to London
Actually, I was none too pleased at the assignment Shelley had suggested as possible for me. It seemed to me that it was leading away from the centre of affairs. Yet, at the same time, it was obviously wise on my part to keep well in with Scotland Yard. I knew which side my bread was buttered, and I knew that any chance I might have of scooping my rivals in Fleet Street was really dependent on my getting hold of some genuine information, as a result of my friendship with Shelley.
Yet I knew that it would never do to let my editor know that I was leaving Broadgate and going back to London, even though it might be only for a few hours. Mike Jones, I knew, would take the line that anything in London could easily be handled by one of his regular staff, and would not justify the payment of space rates for material, which he could get easily by sending a man on a weekly wage around to collect it.
That this would be unreasonable of Mike was, of course, true enough. But people are not as reasonable as they should be. I thought that I should be able to get hold of something useful from Thackeray Court. But just what that information would be I could not guess.
Anyhow, I had plenty of food for thought as I sat back in the corner of an extremely comfortable third-class compartment of a fast train en route for Victoria. True, I paid four shillings and sixpence for a lunch which was eatable, though small in bulk. And I treated myself to a bottle of Bass, carefully preserving the bill for these comestibles, since I thought that, later on, I would put in an expense account, and I saw no reason why I should personally pay for things which I should not have bought had I not been working on this case.
Outside Victoria Station I hailed a taxi. “Do you know Thackeray Court?” I asked the driver.
He scratched his head. “Can’t say I do, guv’nor,” he said slowly. “Would it be one of them big blocks of flats out Hammersmith way?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s either Earl’s Court or Kensington.”
He slapped his knee with a resounding thwack. “I know!” he exclaimed. “Get in, guv’nor. It’s a block not far from Gloucester Road station. I know it.”
So we swung up towards Hyde Park Corner, and then down the long sweep of Knightsbridge. I felt a certain warmth of excitement about my heart. Forgotten now was my old worry that I might be missing something by coming back to London from Broadgate. I thought that I was actually getting near the heart of the whole business. After all, was it not likely that Tilsley’s London home would contain something more, in the way of direct indications of whatever black market racket he was involved in, than his purely temporary lodging in Kent had done? Shelley had thought that it was a scheme for dealing in petrol off the ration, and it might be that I should be able to get hold of something which would definitely connect the man with the garage in Kennington that Shelley had indicated as the centre of the business.
The fact that the police had been here before me did not worry me at all. The eye of the journalist, after all, is a bit different from the eye of the policeman. There might well be things which the police had either overlooked, or had not thought of sufficient importance to be investigated; and those things, with the special knowledge of the case which was now mine, might seem to me to be of genuine value. That, at any rate, was what I was hoping for as I drove along the streets of South Kensington, with their tall, dignified early Victorian houses.
The taxi drew to a standstill. The driver fairly beamed with self-congratulations. “There you are, guv’nor,” he said. “That’s the place.” He indicated a tall block of flats, built in that combination of brick and roughcast typical of building in the ’thirties.
“Thank you,” I said, and paid him off. I drew a deep breath. This was perhaps the first really important moment in the case. On what happened in the next few minutes might well depend my future relationship with Shelley—and, by implication, the future of my job with The Daily Wire. I was in no position to ignore the financial implications of the whole affair. It was highly important to me to re-establish myself in the crazy world of Fleet Street journalism, and to do that I had to get every scrap of exclusive information that was available in this place.
One thing I felt thankful about. I was in a good position with regard to my competitors. As far as I knew no other newspaperman even knew of the existence of Tilsley’s London address. So I was a good few steps ahead of everyone else.
I looked at the block of flats with interest. It was about eight storeys high, built on a plain, severe, what I think is called “functional” plan. In other words, there were no frills and decorations on it.
I went up to what appeared to be the main entrance. Here a porter sat in a small alcove.
“Yus?” he said, fixing me with a stony glare.
“I’m trying to find out something about a Mr. John Tilsley who lives, or did live, here,” I said. It seemed to me that there was nothing to be gained by hiding my reason for coming to the place.
“And who are you?” he retorted, glaring at me again. A most unfriendly chap, this hall-porter. I thought that the financial approach was definitely indicated.
I felt in my pocket and produced a couple of half-crowns. I slid these towards him, and thought that I could detect a sign of a thaw sliding over his grim visage.
“I’m a newspaper man,” I said. “We are interested in Mr. Tilsley, and it will be worth your while to help.”
He looked a bit more amiable. “Oh, I thought you was another of them cops,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows, doing my best to simulate surprise. “Oh, have the police been here?” I asked.
“Have they been here?” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Why, mister, they’ve been in and out of the place for hours this morning. It’s not half an hour since the last of ’em left.”
This was good news. If I found some of Shelley’s underlings from Scotland Yard in possession I might well have found it a bit difficult to explain my presence, and what exactly I was after. Whereas, now that they had gone, it would be easy, I hoped, for me to find my way around the place and do what seemed to me to be necessary in the way of investigating the home of John Tilsley.
“Do you think that I could have a look at Tilsley’s flat?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He appeared very doubtful as to the wisdom of this course of action.
I guessed, however, at the reason for this hesitation. I fished in my pocket and produced another five shillings. These I slid, with an almost diffident air, towards him. This time there was a positive grin on his face as he swiftly pocketed the cash.
“The trouble is,” he said, “that the police locked the flat and took away the key and told me that nobody was to go in until they gave me permission to let people in.”
“Did they say why?” I asked.
“Yus. They said as Tilsley had been murdered.” There was an almost ghoulish expression on the man’s face as he said this. It seemed that he took a considerable delight in being even indirectly involved in a murder case.
“Did you give them the key, then?” I said, wondering how to get around this.
“Yus.” But I thought that I could detect a definite sense of mischief (that is the only word for it) about his face. There was, I thought, something which he had done and which he did not intend to let out; something, in fact, which had been in some way a daring defiance of police orders.
That this was true enough soon became evident. “Is there, then, no way for me to get in and have a look at Tilsley’s flat?” I asked. I guessed that this was the best way to get this awkward customer to tell me what was going on.
“Well, there is and there isn’t, as you might say,” the porter replied.
“What do you mean?”
“These flats have got a tradesman’s entrance at the back,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Yus. And the police took away the key to that door as well as the front one. But they didn’t ask if there was any sort of master key.”
Now I understood the crafty look which he had given me. “And you’ve got a master key?” I said.
“Yus. You see, it’s got to be kept here, because some of the people in the flats are out all day. And they may order some stuff from the grocer or the greengrocer. And then it’s part of my job to take the stuff in and put it in their flats. So I’ve got a master key to deliver the stuff with. See?” This was all said with an air of crafty confidence which is difficult to describe. I congratulated myself, however, on having established such terms of financial confidence with the porter earlier on. It meant that I should have little difficulty in having a view of the flat soon; I didn’t quite know what Shelley would think about what I was doing: he would probably think it strictly unethical; that, however, didn’t matter.
The great thing was that I was getting in, and I was now managing to acquire confidential information that would be of the greatest value in my work for The Daily Wire.
Within five minutes, indeed, I was in Tilsley’s apartment. This was on the fourth floor, at the back of the building. It was an unpretentious flat—probably one of the cheapest in the building, I thought. But if Tilsley was actually involved in some black market racket it was highly probable that he would live in a comparatively unostentatious way. The super-spiv, driving a Rolls-Royce and wearing a fur coat, is for the most part a figure of fiction. The man who is living on the wrong side of the law is usually a man who is anxious not to attract undue attention to himself.
Certainly John Tilsley was a man who lived in a quiet, comparatively inexpensive way. His flat consisted of a living-room, with a gas-cooker hidden by a curtain in an alcove, and a bedroom. Neither of the rooms was big, and they were furnished with a quiet simplicity that spoke eloquently of the taste of the man who had bought the furniture.
“Are these flats let furnished?” I asked the porter, who had followed me into the room.
“No,” he said. “This is Tilsley’s furniture that you can see here, guv’nor.”
I was impressed, I must admit. Somehow I had thought of the late lamented Mr. Tilsley as a rather flashy type. And the way in which this pleasant little sitting-room was furnished showed clearly enough that, whatever might have been his faults, a lack of taste was quite certainly not one of them.
I glanced around. It was no good to think of doing the orthodox things in searching. The police would have done all those things. First of all I did what I always do when I come into a strange room—I looked at the bookshelf. This was a tall, narrow piece of early Victorian mahogany. It had six shelves, crammed tightly with books. I glanced idly at them. They were, at first sight, the miscellaneous stuff that most vaguely literary people accumulate. There were a few novels—P. G. Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. A very mixed batch. I did not spend much time over these, however. My job was not to investigate the late Mr. Tilsley’s literary taste.
The non-fiction shelves interested me more. There were a batch of text-books of chemistry. Not the ordinary school text-books, however, such as one finds in most households where books are not quickly disposed of when not any longer of use. These were advanced text-books, some dealing, I noticed with a feeling of some excitement, with oils and petroleums. There was even a book of the purification of petroleum and gasoline. There were also books on the alkaloids. It looked as if there might be something in Shelley’s hunch that Tilsley was in the petrol black market. He was certainly interested in the chemical background of petrol and oil in a way which was, to say the least, unusual.
Actually, these text-books were the only indication of anything unusual. The other books, as I have said when I wrote of the novels, were a perfectly normal assortment of works, such as one found in any household of ordinary people.
But wait! I pulled myself up as I glimpsed a little black notebook. It was pushed down at the end of a shelf. I fished in my pocket. The book which I had found in Tilsley’s pocket at Broadgate (and which I had kept to myself, thus, I suppose, not playing quite fair with Shelley) was an exact twin. And the scribbles in the Broadgate book had all been obviously written in some sort of code which I had, as yet, had no chance to try to decipher. I had carefully kept the original notebook in the background, and I now thought that in this new book I might well have the clue which would enable me to get to the real heart of the mystery.
I know that this was something in every way reprehensible. I ought not to have tried to keep anything to myself. But I salved my conscience by telling myself that Shelley had not told me by any means all he knew. That, indeed, was almost certainly so; but I knew that I ought to have told him something about these notebooks. Still, I thought that if this new book gave me a clue which would enable me to find out something about the original book I should be able to go to Shelley in real triumph, a first-rate piece of work done.
The first glance at the pages of the new notebook gave me a sense of genuine exultation. I could see, since there were a series of names and addresses, with some cryptic signs and symbols opposite each of them. This was doubtless the clue to enable me to decipher the original book. I made a mental resolution to hand the two books over to Shelley when I got back to Kent. But meanwhile I should spend an hour or two over them, in the hope that I should be able to do something in the way of getting the information that they hid.
I became conscious of the fact that the porter was looking at me curiously.
“Anything else you want to see, guv’nor?” he asked quietly, as if he felt that I had been spending a long time over things that were totally unimportant.
“I want to have a look around,” I explained. “But you need not stay, if you are busy.”
“Can’t leave you here on your own, guv’nor,” he explained. “You see, guv’nor, I don’t mean to insult you, but I don’t know who you are, really, and if anything was missing after you’d gone, they’d say I was responsible. They’d say, I expect, that I’d pinched the stuff. And I’ve got my good name to consider. I’ve been working here for nine years, I have, and no black mark against my name in all that time. I don’t want to spoil that there record, you see.”
I did see. I knew that from the point of view of this man I was a pretty suspicious sort of character. Indeed, if I had been in his position I should have felt very doubtful about allowing any stranger to have a look around the place, And, to do him due justice, I think that the porter had felt pretty doubtful; it was only his natural cupidity, when he realised that I was prepared to pay for the privilege of examining Tilsley’s apartment, that had overcome his natural suspicions of me.
So I strolled into Tilsley’s bedroom, closely followed by the porter. There was, I soon saw, nothing at all here to deserve my attention. Well-kept and neatly-pressed clothes hung in the wardrobe. On the wall was a reproduction, nicely framed, of Augustus John’s portrait of Suggia. On the dressing-table was a picture of the lady whom I had met in the Charrington Hotel at Broadgate. The personal background of the case hung together all right.
I made my way back to the sitting-room again. There was a small roll-top desk beside the window. I opened it (it was not locked), and looked for a few moments at the papers in it. These were piled up in a neat way that seemed to me to indicate that the police had been here before me.
Of course, it was pretty obvious that the police would tend to concentrate on the desk. There was the place where the men from Scotland Yard would expect to find the material they were after. I didn’t think that it was really much good for me to go through the masses of papers that there were left. Anything that was of any real importance would have been taken away. No doubt at this moment—or very soon, anyhow—all the valuable stuff from here would be on Shelley’s desk. And I should be able to swap my notebooks for whatever information Shelley had managed to extract from the papers.
I couldn’t think how the police had missed the little black notebook. Probably they had glanced at the bookcase. They were, however, likely to be looking merely for the hidden document, folded inside a novel, or that sort of thing. The book which, to my mind, stuck out a mile, they would not notice, because they were not looking for that sort of thing.
So I thought that I had really obtained all that I wanted. The way in which I have described it here may make my search sound very perfunctory, but the fact is that I spent some considerable time in hunting there, but found so little of any real value that it seemed to me almost as if my trip to town had been almost wasted. Indeed, if it had not been for the notebook I should have thought that it was so.