Chapter Eleven

It was a week after the exhumation before Benbow had any glimmer of a breakthrough on the Rita Laskey case.

He and Bray were lunching in the basement canteen at Scotland Yard. Over apple tart and coffee, the Admiral let drop a few ripe remarks on the reluctance of the residents of Soho to give him any help.

‘Bleeding lot of yobs,’ he crackled, stirring away angrily with his plastic spoon, ‘Once you get north of Coventry Street, you need thumbscrews to get them to give you so much as their ruddy name.’

Turnbull was sitting with them, calm and serene as ever.

‘What have you got so far, Archie?’

‘Very little,’ grunted Benbow. ‘We’ve got the name of this boyfriend of Laskey’s from a garage chap a few streets away. He was called Golding and had a new Mark X Jag.’

Can’t you trace him through that?’ asked the laboratory officer.

Benbow shook his head. ‘Cunning so-and-so had registered it in the name of Paul Golding of the Newman Street address – insurance and all. We found it had been sold at a St. Alban’s car auction two days after the murder – again under a false name and address.’

‘That surely marks him down as the guilty party,’ chipped in Bray, who had said this to Benbow at least three times already.

‘No, it doesn’t – it bloody well doesn’t!’ answered the chief inspector heatedly. ‘You try saying that in court and you’ll have defence counsel riding you like a donkey! He could have covered up his tracks like this just to protect his affair with the girl from getting back to his wife.’

‘Anything else?’ prompted Turnbull.

‘Damn all, this Golding has vanished off the face of the earth … though for all I know he might be sitting at the next table.’

He scowled around the crowded canteen as if he hoped to catch the elusive Golding red-handed with egg and chips.

‘He’s just a name … a lousy false name,’ he muttered then glugged down his coffee.

Turnbull began chipping away at his pipe bowl with some strange instrument. ‘So you’re up against it? Nothing in the flat?’

Benbow shook his head.

‘Clean as a whistle. We’ve been over it a couple of times. Your boys have had dust and God knows what from there, but the answer’s a lemon.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

Benbow’s bright eyes flashed. ‘Work, boy – work! I reckon we haven’t heard the last of this fellow Golding. Something will crop up. And we’ve got four other jobs on the go. Our office looks like a wastepaper depot. This Golding lark will have to take a back seat until something breaks. I’ve sent the ACC my report on it this morning – if he doesn’t like it, he can stuff it!’ he ended pugnaciously.

As if to give his pessimism the lie, things began to happen during the next twenty-four hours. Soon after lunch, when he had started to attack the mountain of paperwork in his office, one of the Drug Squad sergeants rang through.

‘Roberts here, sir … may be nothing in it, but we picked up a chap over the weekend who might be of interest to you. He’s charged with unlawful possession … a dozen decks of heroin on him. He’s in a bad way, been on the hard stuff for a long time. Remanded for a week, in Brixton but he’s starting to twitch already.’

Benbow conjured up a nauseating picture of the man in the hell of a drugless existence in prison. He frowned.

‘OK, but how’s that going to help me?’

‘You sent Bray over the other day to ask if we had any angles on the injection marks on that Laskey woman. He mentioned that one of her calling places was the Nineties Club. We’ve never had a squeak about that place till now –as far as peddling goes – but this junkie we picked up in Leicester Square has started to talk … and he mentioned that place.’

Benbow began to see the light.

‘Ah, this sounds more like it. We’ve been up a gum tree with this one, about time we had a lead from somewhere. Is he ready to blow the gaff?’

‘I think so. The doc here says that he’ll have to give him a bit of the dope to keep him sane but I think he’ll hold off long enough for us to work on him – within Judge’s Rules, of course.’

Benbow ignored the sarcasm in Roberts’ voice.

‘When can we see this bird?’ he asked.

‘This afternoon would be best. He’ll go off the boil once he gets a shot from the M.O.’

Later that afternoon, Benbow and Bray stepped through the barred inner gate of Brixton Prison into the bleak courtyard. There were formal flower beds set out in grim regularity but nothing could detract from the harsh surroundings of the ugly building. Men in drab overalls slouched around with brooms and buckets and trusties moved around with something approaching jauntiness in their step, their armbands worn with the pride of the V.C.

A warder led them to the remand block. After a ritual of opening and closing knobless doors, they found the man they wanted shut up in a small room with the sergeant from the Drug Squad.

Bray had not seen an addict in the withdrawal state before and he came away from Brixton with no desire to see another. The man, an emaciated skeleton with septic sores on his face, sat shaking on a chair in the middle of the small room in which he was being interviewed. His eyes were staring and his jaw chattered so much that he could hardly answer. A coarse prison blanket was draped around his shoulders but he seemed to rattle with cold, in spite of the oppressive central heating.

Sergeant Roberts straightened up when they came in and gave them a summary of his results so far.

‘Our friend here, name of Jack Feiner, sir – he’s being very sensible. The doctor will be along soon – if he helps us all he can, I think we can recommend that he gets some medical attention.’

He winked at Benbow and the haggard wreck, now two days without an injection, raised a gaunt face in supplication. Bray felt sick.

‘Better come outside, Roberts,’ suggested Benbow.

They went into the corridor and Bray shut the door. A warder was left standing impassively over the pathetic figure.

‘What’s he said?’ asked the Admiral.

‘Told us about two people who are flogging decks of heroin. One is a barrow boy we’ve had our eye on for some time. The other is Ray Silver, the owner of the Nineties Club.’

Benbow considered this. ‘Doesn’t get us any further on the Golding angle. Let’s have another word with him.’

They went back into the room and Benbow stood over the trembling figure in the chair.

‘You used to get your heroin from Ray Silver, that right?’

The man stuttered something and nodded his head.

‘When was the last time?’

Feiner murmured something unintelligible and the chief inspector lowered his head to listen. He eventually gathered that the man never dealt directly with Silver, but knew that his waiter did the distributing.

‘But do you definitely say that Ray Silver is behind it?’ persisted Benbow.

Feiner’s head trembled on his emaciated shoulders. ‘No, I only think so,’ he mumbled. ‘I only worked with Albert, the waiter’

He had been going to the Nineties until a month before. He maintained, as firmly as he was able, that he had never heard of anyone called Rita Laskey or Paul Golding. Benbow spent a few more minutes snapping questions, bending low over the man to speak sharply into his ear and try to pick up the garbled replies from the pathetic remnant of what once had been a man.

Feiner explained that he got the drugs from the waiter in an envelope which was put under the bill when the man brought it for drinks purchased in the club. Feiner would put the money for it on the tray and get only nominal change for the sake of appearances.

He had no proof, direct proof, much to Benbow’s chagrin. Roberts was even more annoyed, as he was more directly concerned in the drug trade. Feiner could not say that Silver was in on the racket and it was only his word that Albert was dealing in heroin. The evidence would not be good enough to take to court unless they could get some corroboration from another witness or find drugs on the premises.

‘We’ve got enough to get a warrant for this club, though,’ said Benbow. ‘We’d better make arrangements to turn it over pretty soon.’

The addict’s mind began to wander after a time and his wits seemed shattered. The detectives left the cell and walked back to the great steel grid that closed the inner side of the entrance arch.

‘I’m sure he’s speaking the truth,’ said Roberts seriously. ‘Under all that shaking, he’s still ticking over mentally. I’ve seen ’em ten times worse than that and they get better in a week – until they get their hands on the next lot of junk.’

They were checked out of the prison and continued their talk on the way back to the Yard in the car.

‘We can’t really expect any tie-up between this chap and the Laskey affair,’ said Benbow. ‘The only link is drugs and that’s getting so common around the town these days that it needn’t be a common denominator at all … so go ahead and knock off this Silver character if you can, we’ll come along for the laughs if you don’t mind … we’re due for a bloody miracle and we may pick up something useful.’

Roberts looked worried. ‘We can’t touch Silver unless he’s got dope on his premises. I think I could risk knocking off this waiter but, if he doesn’t admit anything and we don’t get any confirmation, I’ll never get a charge to stick.’

At seven o’clock that night, armed with a search warrant, they arrived in Gerrard Street. Benbow, Bray, and Roberts, together with a detective constable and two uniformed PCs, pushed past the doorman with a brief flourish of the warrant and descended into the club.

At that early hour, there were only a couple of hard drinking types at the bar. The band had not yet arrived and all the tables were empty. The detectives, looking more like Yard men than anything television had ever dreamed up, marched past Snigger on their way to the office. If they hoped to catch Silver red-handed with a sack of morphine over his shoulder, they were out of luck. He was sitting behind his desk, fast asleep.

He woke with a start and stared owlishly at the intruders. For a moment he thought it was a return of Conrad’s hooligans and fear leapt into his eyes.

‘Who the devil are you?’

‘Police officers – are you Ray Silver?’ asked Roberts brusquely.

Silver paled slightly but kept his face well under control.

‘That’s me. What d’you want?’

‘We have reason to suspect that you may be in unlawful possession of narcotics in contravention of the Dangerous Drugs Act … in other words, chum, we want to see if you’ve got any stuff stacked away here.’

Bray, watching Silver’s face, could have sworn that he saw relief cross it. He seemed to become unconcerned, almost bouncy, waving his hand around the room.

‘You must be off your chump, boy – but help yourself. I suppose you’ve got a warrant.’

‘Here it is.’ Roberts half-pulled a form from his pocket but made no attempt to show it to Silver.

‘Carry on, then … what bum has been trying to make trouble for me?’

Benbow ignored him.

‘Where’s your waiter?’

For the first time, the Eurasian looked uneasy.

‘I don’t know – he should be there. Why ask?’

‘He’s taken a powder by the look of it,’ snapped Benbow, ‘but he’ll have some awkward questions to face when we pick him up.’

It took a week to find Albert, as it turned out. Getting a tip-off on the internal phone from the doorman, the waiter had nipped smartly up the rear fire escape and gone to earth in Stepney, until a disgruntled junkie had shopped him to the local police.

Back in the club, the Admiral had another poser for Ray Silver.

‘Ever heard of Jack Feiner?’ he rapped.

Silver had never heard the name, although he would probably have recognised the addict’s face. He was able to put on a genuinely puzzled expression and shake his head with convincing innocence.

Benbow sighed. ‘Come on then, Roberts, let’s have a look around – give me your keys, Silver.’

The proprietor handed them over and sat complacently as the policemen rooted through all his drawers and cupboards. Bray and a PC pulled up the carpets and looked for loose floorboards, they sounded the walls and moved the pictures – all without finding anything incriminating.

‘The big key is the one for the safe,’ sneered Silver with offensive helpfulness.

Benbow felt from the start that they would find nothing in the office and cursed silently. The big safe held a few hundred pounds in cash, some ledgers, stock books, and an empty steel drawer. There was nothing else to be seen in it.

Benbow was turning away in disgust when he caught a wink from the Drug Squad man. Roberts made a gesture with his thumb that clearly meant that he wanted Silver out of the room.

‘Nothing here, Bray,’ said Benbow loudly. ‘Take Mr Silver out into the other rooms here and ask him to open all the cupboards for you, and try to find that bloody waiter.’

He threw the bunch of keys over and Bray shepherded the grinning owner outside. When the door had closed, Benbow dropped to his knees beside Roberts who was still staring into the safe.

‘What’s all the mystery?’

‘Look – in the crack where those runners for the drawer are fixed.’

The sergeant pointed to a pair of supports which were welded on to the sides of the safe to support the drawer. Benbow craned his thick neck nearer.

‘Ah, that white stuff, you mean – in the cracks?’

‘Yeah, might be nothing but if it’s dope we’ve got something to throw at him – he’s so damn cocky that he’s obviously unloaded all his stock. He must have got a whisper somehow.’

As he spoke, Roberts was carefully brushing the few grains of white powder from the runners into a clean envelope that he took from the desk. There were a few more on the opposite side and he added these to the collection.

‘No need to put that greasy swine on his guard if it is morphine or heroin. And if it isn’t, it’ll save us from looking damn fools.’

They went to the bar and with the help of the detective constables, shifted all the bottles, pulled down the glasses, and explored the cupboards below the great engraved mirrors.

Snigger looked on uneasily and almost blew a blood vessel when he saw one of the men push aside his pile of carefully prepared cigarette packets in order to tap the back walls of a cupboard. For a moment, he thought that the detective was going to look through the cartons themselves but, at the last minute, he collected them up and replaced them. Snigger let his breath out in a long controlled sigh of sheer relief, but he was soon disturbed again by Benbow summoning him to the office.

Leaving Molly to look after the disarranged bar, and the two already inebriated patrons, he followed Silver and the policeman back to the room at the rear of the club. Here Benbow and Roberts put them through a snappy interrogation.

Where was Albert? Did they admit to any dealing in drugs? Did they know of any addicts amongst the customers? A string of accusative questions fell like water on so many ducks’ backs. Snigger maintained a shocked indignant pose, while Silver blandly denied knowledge of anything at all.

Eventually, Benbow gave up and led the procession back to the front door. The Eurasian pranced behind, still sweating slightly but as cocky as a fat bantam.

‘Barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. Your snout must have been having you on … you ought to know I run a respectable business.’

He watched them drive off, blissfully unaware of the few grains of dusty powder carefully tucked away in Sergeant Roberts’ breast pocket.