Chapter Twenty-Four

Sacrifice

 

“All right,” Roger said into the radio telephone. “Move in now.” He flicked the mouthpiece off, and concentrated on his driving, startling Appleby by the way he took the next corner. “Owen’s got in there. Now we’ve got to get him out.” He swung round another corner, and a motor-cyclist who looked like a post office telegraph “boy” called out:

“Follow me!”

Appleby was nursing his straw hat.

“How f-f-far is it?” he demanded. “Time enough to k-k-kill me?”

“Just hold tight,” Roger said. He felt both excitement and satisfaction, and did not realise that Appleby was staring at him, seeing that excitement in his eyes, knowing that the thing Roger West really thrived on was positive action; if there was a fight, he hated not to be able to be in it, and at moments like this would rather have had Owen’s rank than his own.

The motor-cyclist “boy” turned a corner; when they swung round, Roger saw other cars and vans drawn up across the road, blocking the approach to and all escape from Forest Ley.

Roger pulled up at the side of the road, got out, and spoke as Appleby started to follow.

“You stay here. Your job comes later.” He began to run towards the drive of Forest Ley, and a man caught up with him. “How are things? Owen all right?”

“I shouldn’t think he stands a chance,” the man said. “He’s crashed his machine at the entrance to the air raid shelter. Three men are trying to get there. They—”

The crack of a shot came clearly.

Roger turned into the drive, and saw several plain-clothes policemen by the side of the house, one man on top of the garage. As he reached the nearest man, the man on the roof warned:

“Careful, super!”

Roger called up: “What’s the position?”

“There are two men with revolvers at the air raid shelter. Whenever we show our noses they shoot. Can’t tell you what’s going on below them. I’ve got some tear gas here. If I could throw a shell into the mouth of the shelter it might do some good. Angle’s a bit awkward, though.”

Roger said: “Yes.” He pushed his way towards the corner of the house. As he reached it, a shot barked and a bullet chipped pieces off the brick. The man on the roof of the garage said:

“I warned you, sir.”

Roger called: “You over there! It’s a waste of time. We’ve got all your men, and you can’t get away.”

No one answered, no-one fired. There was a shuffling sound, as if a long way off; Roger believed that it was coming from the shelter itself.

“Other end of the garden covered?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir.”

“And the approaches to all neighbours’ houses, both sides in both roads?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” said Roger. “Hand me down one of those gas shells.”

“But, Mr. West—”

“Hand one down,” said Roger. “Don’t throw the damned tiling.” He watched the top of the air raid shelter closely, saw only the dark approach to the steps leading down, and could not be sure whether anyone was still there or not; but he was sure of one thing. Young Owen was there with the Endicott girl, and they had to be rescued.

If they were alive.

He looked back towards the front of the house, and saw men moving about; then one man appeared at the gate, thrusting ahead of the others.

This was the bearded Simpson, alias Stone, alias—whom?

The man came towards him, and Roger waited, grim-faced. A hammering sound came from the air raid shelter, as if a door were being battered down.

“Is your mother Mrs. Cockell, sometimes known as Mrs. Stone?”

Stone answered gruffly:

“Yes.” After a pause, he went on: “She used her original married name—my father’s name.”

“Listen, Stone,” Roger said, “there’s a police officer and the woman Endicott, down in that air raid shelter. Your mother is shooting at anyone who goes near. Can she escape through the other end of the shelter?”

Stone said: “Not if you’ve surrounded the house behind this.”

“She thinks she can get out, then,” Roger said. “She’ll probably kill the prisoners on her way. Would she kill you?”

“I’ll find out,” Stone said in a hard voice.

He went towards the entrance to the air raid shelter, calling in a clear voice: “Mother, you’ve got to give yourself up. You and Slessor and everyone there. You’ve got to give yourself up.”

Then, after a pause, he called again: “Mother, this is Jim. You’ve got to give yourself up.”

He was half-way to the air raid shelter when the woman appeared, as if she had to make sure that the approaching man was her son. As her head showed above the steps, Roger ran forward from a standing start, and hurled the tear gas shell over Stone’s head, and into the entrance of the air raid shelter.

 

Ruth heard only odd little sounds after the first shot, and she kept crying Cy’s name, but he did not answer, and there were no more sounds of footsteps. She pressed against the locked door, longing for word from him, but everything was silent, and his voice stilled.

Then other voices broke the quiet, footsteps sounded; and the woman Shell asked clearly:

“Is he dead?”

“Can’t be alive after that lot.” That was Fats. “But he’s blocking the entrance, and we can’t get in.”

“Can’t you clear the wreckage away?”

“We’ll need ten minutes,” said the second man; it was the handsome Slessor. “The police will be here if we don’t keep them off.”

“Only one of us can work down here,” said the woman. “You move the machine and get that door open. Slessor and I will keep the police off.”

Ruth pressed against the door, eyes tightly closed, hating what she had learned. At first the sounds outside meant nothing to her, but soon she understood what was happening. One man, Fats, was moving aside the wreckage so that he could open the door. So they needed to come into the air raid shelter to escape from the police. Once they saw her they would kill her; terror drove away all other emotion. She stood away from the door. She heard the metallic sounds of the wreckage being moved, and once Shell came near and asked:

“How much longer?”

“Nearly through,” Fats said.

Ruth stood in the darkness, until suddenly the light went on – the blessed light, she would have thought only a short while ago. It showed the bare cement walls, the oddments about the shelter, the far doorway; and she realised that the other door was the way of escape for these people. They would kill her for the sake of killing, she had no doubt about that.

She heard a different sound, a sharp click; and a moment later she heard the door begin to open. Suddenly, wildly, she turned round, snatched up a chair, and smashed the lights; and darkness fell in here. She heard Fats exclaim. She saw a faint light filter in, but it was still very dark. She heard the man breathing, then heard the creak of the door as it opened, and saw the shape of Fats, vague and shadowy. She brought the chair down on his head and shoulders, heard him cry out, and then heard men’s voices, and shouting.

Fats was lying in a heap in the doorway.

A man called: “Mrs. Endicott, are you there?”

She began to cry.

 

Roger forced his way past the tear gas cloud, through the wreckage of the motor-cycle and over a man’s huddled body. Other police were following him. Already Shell, a dark man, and Slessor, had been taken prisoner, and Stone had gone back to the road. Roger shone a torch round the cellar, and saw Ruth Endicott’s bowed figure close to the wall. He went towards her, put his arms round her, and heard her saying to herself: “He’s dead, he’s dead.”

Appleby said: “He’s not dead yet, Handsome. If we can get him to hospital qu-qu-quickly, and send for MacKenzie, he’ll stand a chance. He didn’t do himself any good c-c-crash-ing the machine here, and he got a bullet in his head, but—well, I’ve told you.”

Appleby was looking pale.

“We’ll fix it,” Roger said, and turned to Ruth Endicott, who was standing looking at Owen’s unconscious figure. “You heard that—he’s got a chance.” He raised a hand to some local men, and saw an ambulance already on its way into the drive. It would still be touch and go.

Roger began to give orders.

He finished his inspection of the air raid shelter an hour later. The second door wasn’t a normal second exit, but led to another deeper shelter at a lower level, and to a tunnel which ran beneath the garden of the house behind Forest Ley. There had been good reason for Mrs. Cockell to believe that she had a chance to escape; she might have done, but for her son and Owen. It would do no harm to let Ruth Endicott believe that her own desperate attack on Fats had made quite sure that the others were captured.

When the ambulance had gone, and the prisoners from Forest Ley had been taken off, Roger and Appleby, with an Epping Superintendent, met Jim Stone in the library at the back of the house.

“Yes, I’ll tell you all I can now,” Stone said, still gruffly. “It goes back a long way, but I’ll make it short. My father was as honest as they come, but he died when I was a kid. My mother married Cockell, who made a fortune out of war-time profiteering, and handling stolen goods. When I realized it, I walked out on them. When he died, my mother tried to make peace, but I’d married Mabel by then, and my mother didn’t like her. She wanted me to leave her.” Stone paused, as if to control his voice. “Cockells’ shares were owned by a syndicate at that time, I thought my mother had been bought out, but in fact she retained a controlling interest. She said she didn’t. Her original job had been managing the hostel – before she married Cockell – and it seemed natural that she should take that on again.

“She wanted me to go into Cockells, and I wouldn’t. She thought it was because of Mabel. You kept asking if anyone had reason to want my wife dead, and the true answer was, yes – my mother had.

“But I couldn’t be sure,” Stone continued, heavily.

“After I bought that little shop in Whitechapel, I started investigating, and soon recognised Fats as a man who had worked with my father. I found out that he lived at the hostel. By that time I was beginning to fear the truth—that my mother had planned Mabel’s murder. Did—did she?”.

“I’m afraid she did,” Roger answered quietly. “We picked Slessor up, and he’s made a full statement. Your mother wanted Endicott dead because he was blackmailing her. She gave him the job of killing your wife first, and then had him killed because he could have given the whole game away.”

Stone said: “Yes. Yes, I know. It was the shells I found at Endicott’s place which told me. My stepfather had always called my mother Shell, and shells had been used as an identification sign among the criminals who worked for him. But I didn’t know she was involved,” Stone went on. “I was afraid that she was, but didn’t know for certain. I just had to try to find out for myself.”

 

It was a little after eight o’clock that night when Roger got back to the Yard. He found Hardy still at his desk, looking tired, but brisk enough and immaculate.

“Evening, Handsome,” he said with unusual affability. “Very nice job.”

“In its way,” Roger said.

“Twenty-six men arrested at the Lambeth hostel,” said Hardy, “and several of them have broken down now they know they haven’t a chance. They worked at Cockell’s shops normally, went out on these special jobs, and did exactly what you always believed. Two of them say that some were being trained for bigger jobs—banks, wage snatches, that kind of thing.”

Roger said: “It had to grow. You couldn’t organise a thing like that and not extend the range—it had to start losing efficiency or increase it, and Shell Cockell had the organising mind.”

“Where is she?”

“Across at Cannon Row,” Roger said. “She hasn’t said a word, but Slessor can’t stop talking. Fats and a man named Rawson are the same. Not that they’ve got anything more to tell us; once we’d made sure it was Mrs. Cockell, the rest looked after itself.” He dropped on to the arm of a chair. “Any news about Owen?”

“The operation is taking place now.”

Roger said: “There’s a man we need badly, but Appleby doubts whether he’ll be fit enough to come back on the force, even if he lives. If ever there was a case for the George Medal, this is it. He drove his machine full force into the air raid shelter to block the approach to it. If he hadn’t, we might have lost out.” Roger pushed his hand through his hair, and forced a laugh. “Well, we didn’t lose anybody. You don’t need a formal report now, do you?”

“Just wanted to hear that you were all right,” said Hardy. “You go home. By the way, where’s this Endicott woman?”

Roger said, half smiling: “Dr. Appleby took her under his wing. She’s at his place. Best thing for her.” He stood up, and said: “Good night, Commander,” and walked slowly back to his own office, looked round, then went out.

He reached home a little after nine o’clock. The boys were in front of a television set, watching a thriller, while Janet was doing some ironing, and looking at the picture from time to time. Roger said: “I’ll go into the front room and have a drink.” He turned round, but Martin leaned forward, switched off the television, and said: “We don’t really want that.”

“Of course we don’t,” agreed Richard, and they looked eagerly at their father. “How did it go, Dad?”

“Most of it, very well,” replied Roger. “The rest—well, I’ll know in the morning.”

In fact he knew as early as half past six, when the telephone bell rang. He turned over in bed to pluck up the receiver, felt Janet start, and heard Appleby say: “Handsome, you can stop worrying.”

“Owen?”

“Yes. They got the bullet out. He’ll survive, unless he has real bad luck. I’ve told this young woman here, and she can’t stop crying.”

“She will,” said Roger, softly. “She will.”

 

Ruth did stop crying six months later, when Owen came out of hospital, and married her. Owen had already resigned from the force, for Jim Stone had inherited his mother’s shares and had given him a block in Cockell’s Limited. He was already plunging himself into the business.

By then Mrs. Cockell, Slessor and Fats had been hanged.

By then, too, Owen had been cited for the George Medal.

Roger West would never forget the adoration in Ruth Owen’s eyes when she looked up at her husband after they had come away from the investiture.