In Which We Try to Find the Chief
I knew well enough that when once Shelley had got on the scent of a case he was not a man to let go until he had got the whole thing thoroughly and finally solved. But at the same time I realised that he had now got something difficult to do. The general outline of the problem, as he had given it to us, was no doubt correct enough.
Personally I could not see how the question of the lift could be solved. The thing seemed to me to be fantastic and impossible to straighten out. How a body could be found in a locked lift, the locks clearly not having been in any way tampered with, seemed to me to be such a nightmare problem that any rational solution appeared absolutely impossible. I was, indeed, not at all surprised that Shelley thought this of really vital importance.
In fact, it seemed to me that Shelley had now succeeded in solving the case in its broad outlines; he had not, however, settled one not unimportant part of it—the identity of the murderer. That the chief of the drug-peddling gang was the man responsible for the deaths of two members of the gang seemed to be certain.
But who was the chief? That was the great problem. After all, if he was someone outside those we had already met in the case it would not be at all easy to get hold of him. We should be working completely in the dark. If, on the other hand, he was one of those we had already met, who could it be? I assumed that Tim Foster and Maya Johnson were not implicated in the crime; and somehow I couldn’t see Mrs. Skilbeck as one of the great figures in a drug racket. Bender had no brains, and, while there were a few others who had entered on the fringes of the case, I could not readily envisage them as drug-kings. The whole thing was, it seemed to me, as puzzling as ever.
I looked back at that morning when I had seen Bender staggering over the promenade. Many things had happened since that moment, and, while I now knew a lot more about the background of the case, I was really not much further forward in my knowledge of its fundamentals.
I wandered into another little café after I had left the Police Station, ordered myself a pot of tea and some toast, and sat back, in a brown study.
Then I suddenly became conscious of the fact that a familiar figure was sitting opposite me. It was Shelley.
“Where did you come from?” I asked in some surprise.
“Deep in thought, weren’t you?” Shelley said with a broad grin. “Well, Jimmy my lad, I thought that I’d like to have a few words with you away from the estimable Beech. He is a perfectly respectable officer, for whom I have a good deal of admiration, but he doesn’t possess one of the vital necessities for the good detective.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That little touch of creative imagination which is needful if you are to get to the heart of a case from the start,” Shelley said. “You see, I had to apply a considerable amount of pressure to our friend Mrs. Skilbeck before I got her to admit the connexion of Tilsley with the drug racket. Her main aim now seems to be to keep his memory sweet. And if for a moment she was prepared to admit that he was a peddler of cocaine it would make him a bit of a disreputable individual—not at all the sort of person whom she wants to remember. But at the same time she gave way when I pressed her hard. And I don’t think that Beech would ever have got to that point. The idea that the man might be selling cocaine is the sort of idea that only comes to a man with a trace of creative imagination.”
I smiled. Shelley seemed to have forgotten that the idea had come from me—or rather from Maya Johnson originally. Still, as long as the idea seemed to be leading somewhere I didn’t mind all that much if my part in it was rather overlooked.
“The greatest problem, I suppose, is finding the identity of the chief,” I said.
“Yes; that was why I followed you here, Jimmy,” Shelley said. “You see, our branch at Scotland Yard have sent me some details that I think may lead us to the man we’re after. They’re a bit too vague to be immediately valuable, but I thought that if you did some unofficial snooping around you might be able to lay your hands on what we’re after.”
“You want me to become a detective again?” I remarked with a grin.
“Something like that. Mind you, there will be a bit of danger attached to this, Jimmy,” he said. “I’m not questioning your personal bravery, but I think that you should be warned before you shove your head into the lion’s mouth.”
“I’m not braver than the next man,” I said. “But if I’m allowed eventually to publish what I find out, I don’t mind taking a chance on it.”
“Good man!” Shelley answered. “I thought that was what you would say.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a bit of a long story,” Shelley explained. “If you’ll listen I’ll see if I can make it clear to you.”
Fortunately the café in which we were sitting was practically empty. We could talk quietly without much chance of being overheard.
“Our men at the Yard usually have a fair idea of the gangs that are involved in this drug business,” the detective went on. “They may not always have enough evidence to convict them, but they keep a pretty close watch on them, and are ready to jump at any moment if it seems likely that a conviction can be obtained. I hope you understand what I mean, Jimmy.”
“I think I do.”
“You see, there’s a fairly constant amount of illegal cocaine in circulation in this country. If some new source of supply becomes available we usually learn about it pretty soon. And then the job is to run this new source down. If we can do that, we’re happy.”
“And a new source has become known lately?”
“Yes. And it centres on this bit of the coast. The idea they were working on at the Yard was that it was being smuggled in.”
“Smuggled?” This surprised me somewhat.
“Yes; there still is a certain amount of smuggling of one sort and another going on, and it seems at any rate possible that drugs are being smuggled in from a continental port,” Shelley explained. “You see, it is almost impossible for the coastguards to protect the whole of the English coast. The coastguards, in fact, are spread out pretty thin, and there are bound to be spots where little guard is kept. I don’t suggest that this corner is in any way worse protected than the rest; but it is here, in Kent, that our drug squad suggest a new source of supply of cocaine has become available in recent months. It’s not at all difficult to decide just where the stuff is centred on, you know.”
I followed this pretty well. It was clear that the drug experts at Scotland Yard would have a fair knowledge of what was going on. If cocaine was being smuggled into the country and was then being distributed from some spot on the east coast, it might well be that Scotland Yard would become aware of that fact. But Shelley had asked me to help him in the case, and I couldn’t for the life of me see just where it seemed to him that I should be useful in the present set-up.
“But what is to be my job in all this?” I asked, rather puzzled.
“I was coming to that in a moment,” Shelley said. “You see, as I have explained, our people get some idea of what is going on; they know, with some degree of accuracy, just where the drug comes from. And sometimes they have a fair idea, too, of where it is going to and how it is distributed.”
“They have that in this case?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know that I should say that they know all about these things,” Shelley admitted. “But they have some idea, and those ideas lead them to some particular spots which need close investigation.”
I began to see what the detective was getting at now, and I said as much to him.
“They know,” Shelley went on, “that the centre of distribution is somewhere not very far from Broadgate. They have a suspicion that one or two local people are in some way connected with the business of distributing cocaine. But, in general, this was one of the cases that I was describing to you just now—a case in which suspicions may be quite strong but in which it is not possible to go into any definite legal action, since the direct evidence is lacking.”
“You think that I could get that direct evidence?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What have I to do?” I asked.
“Don’t forget what I said about the dangers involved in this business,” Shelley warned me.
“I haven’t forgotten,” I assured him.
“Right. Then I’ll give you the details, as they were given to me on the phone from the Yard this morning,” Shelley said.
You may be sure that I awaited this with some eagerness. I felt in my bones that this was the last lap. Even though there might still be something to do, the fact remained that if I could do what Shelley was suggesting, I might well lead them to the end of the chase. Thus I might be leading to the final proof of the innocence of Tim Foster and Maya Johnson. If I could bring that off, I should have no complaints. I should think that my intrusion was in every way justified, and I should be finally putting myself in the running for almost every special job that Fleet Street might have to offer me.
“Our people at the Yard,” Shelley continued, “have no idea who is the leader of this conspiracy. Various names have been mentioned, but none of them convey anything to me, or to any of the others at the Yard. In fact, they are almost certain to be false names. Few people in this racket sail under their true colours, you know.”
“I didn’t expect that they would,” I commented.
“So, unless the names they use are in some way already moderately familiar to our people,” Shelley said, “we can’t depend on getting much out of them merely from their names.”
“But you have to start the investigation in some way,” I objected.
“Usually by finding a place which is important,” Shelley said. “You see, people like this gang may work out a most elaborate way of distributing the drugs to the unfortunate folk who are slaves of the drug habit. That’s all right. What I may call the secondary distribution may be brilliantly organised. But what about the primary distribution?”
For the first time I was a little puzzled. I didn’t quite see what Shelley was getting at, and I told him so, saying that I wasn’t able to appreciate just what he meant by primary and secondary distribution.
“Well,” Shelley said, “let me explain. If you smuggled some illegal drug, like cocaine, into this country, and had to get rid of it, selling to a lot of drug addicts in various parts, how would you set about it?”
“Get some sort of legitimate business as a screen, I suppose.” said I.
“Yes; that is what I call the secondary distribution,” the detective said. “You see, if the thing is done on a fairly big scale, it is necessary to have a number of sub-agents, who may be bad lots, like Tilsley, or may be perfectly innocent folk, as you assume Tim Foster to be. But the reception of the drug in this country must take place at a sort of headquarters somewhere. And it is probable that the same headquarters will be the place where the stuff is distributed to some of the principal agents. Now do you see what I am getting at?”
“I think so.”
“And you also see what it is that I am asking you to do, Jimmy?” There was an almost eager tone about Shelley’s voice as he said this, a tone which seemed to indicate that he thought I presented him with the best possible chance of finding out what he was after.
“You think you know where this distribution centre is?” I asked.
“Yes,” he nodded.
“And it’s in this neighbourhood?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him rather curiously. “Don’t think that I’m trying to wangle out of this, Inspector,” I said. “But there is one thing that strikes me as a little odd.”
“What’s that?” he snapped.
“If you are pretty sure that you know the place where the gang meet, why don’t you have an ordinary police raid, and pull them all into the net? You could easily sort them out afterwards, surely, and decide which of them were the birds you are really after. I should have thought that would have been the normal course of action.”
He grinned cheerfully. “Of course it would, Jimmy,” he admitted. “That would have been the normal course of action, but then, you see, this is not quite the normal sort of case. That’s why I’m suggesting something different.”
“What is abnormal about this case?” I asked.
“The murders,” Shelley said, and there was something impressive, I thought, about the very quietness of his voice as he said this. “This gang won’t be so easy to deal with. You see, if a man is found guilty of dealing with dangerous drugs, he may have to face a heavy fine, he may even, if it is a bad case, have to face a stiff term of imprisonment. But this is a murder case, and if a man is found guilty of murder, he may have to hang! And that is something that makes every criminal sit up and take notice. If we raided the place, we might have a shooting match that would end in a shambles; and the man might succeed in getting away. Then we should have to begin all over again.”
“But what makes you think that I could do any better?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to get out of things; I was merely curious.
“You can go there, Jimmy, as a stranger. You can get into conversation with people, and you can let us know the results of your conversation. You may even be able to let us have the name of the chief villain. That’s what we want.”
“All right,” I said, “when and where do I begin?”
“Good man!” he exclaimed. “You begin as soon as you like, and the place you go to is the Smithy Inn, not far from Deal.”