Chapter Thirteen

Paul Jacobs might have found it difficult to explain why he walked past the block of flats and carried on without a pause to the end of the square. Something intangible triggered off his outsize sense of caution. He crossed the road and walked past his hideout without so much as giving the building a second glance.

It was three days after Snigger’s visit and the square was in its mid-afternoon peaceful period. The slight young man with long side-whiskers who leant against the railings around the dusty patch of grass looked nothing like a policeman, even to Jacobs. Probably there were fifty such loungers at that moment in London, all reading their newspapers and minding their own business.

But a second after seeing him, Paul looked up at the fourth-floor windows and saw that his bathroom curtains were not hanging exactly true. He may have left them like that, he thought, but it was unlikely. He was a man of obsessive tidiness, both in his business and criminal ventures and in his personal ways. He suddenly felt convinced that someone had been into the flat since he was last there – and he had no caretaker or cleaning woman.

He crossed the road and walked within a few inches of the waiting man, who took not the slightest notice of him. Reaching the corner of the square, Jacobs doubled back along the lane behind Byng Place and approached the flats from the rear.

As he passed the opening of a mews, he saw a police car concealed in a garage entrance. At the back of the flats, where the boiler house was placed, he saw a young and athletic-looking street cleaner leaning on a brush in the centre of an already perfectly swept lane.

Paul’s razor-edge sense of self-preservation reared on its hind legs and he went rapidly back to Goodge Street Tube station and found a telephone box. He dialled the number of his flat and waited. There was a long pause and, for a time, he thought that there would be no answer. Then the ringing tone clicked off and a voice said gruffly, ‘Hello, who’s that?’

He made no reply but put his receiver down and quickly made his way down to the platform to catch a train to Paddington and the safe obscurity of South Wales.

In the flat, Benbow stood rattling the button of the telephone. Then he dialled the operator and got through to a supervisor.

‘Chief Inspector Benbow here, miss, any luck with that call?’

‘Sorry, sir … it was far too short. All we can tell you is that it came from a public callbox in this exchange area.’

He grunted his thanks and dropped the telephone back into its cradle.

‘Three bleeding days, and then when we do get a call they can’t trace it,’ he complained to Bray, who was busy slitting open cushions with a penknife.

‘Don’t suppose it matters – if he’s as cunning as he has been up till now we wouldn’t catch him with a hoary old gag like that.’

Benbow nodded gloomily. ‘That’s if it was him – he didn’t say a word.’

They had paid three previous visits to the flat since Bray had found it and had a man in there ever since, hoping to catch Golding when he returned.

On entering the place on the Monday evening, they had found a note from Gigal pushed under the door. It was addressed to ‘Mr G.’ and read:

‘ALL UP THIS END. SOMEBODY HAS SQUEALED. MAYBE SILVER, THOUGH HE’S BEEN NICKED AND THE CLUB CLOSED. BE VERY CAREFUL. THE BUSIES ARE ON TO YOU. I AM SHOVING OFF TONIGHT BEFORE THEY PICK ME UP. USE THE STEPNEY ADDRESS IF YOU WANT TO GET IN TOUCH BUT I’M KEEPING LOW FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS.’

Snigger had been denied the chance to shove off, but had steadfastly refused to say anything at all about Golding. In spite of all Benbow’s efforts, he refused to say anything except to repeat that he was innocent of any charge that was brought against him.

He showed considerable sense in doing this, thought Benbow with ungracious admiration. The clever crooks who say nothing usually get off better than those who unburden themselves with the mental purge of a long confession.

After Gigal had been remanded, the detectives, including Turnbull from the laboratory, came back to the flat. They turned it inside out in the hope of finding something that would help to trace the elusive drug smuggler and murderer. There were a few clothes in the wardrobe but all were good ready-mades from London stores. There were fingerprints in plenty that matched those in the Newman Street flat, but this put them no further forward.

‘Not even confirmation that he killed Draper,’ moaned Bray. The butt of the Webley that had been sent back from Munich showed a confused mixture of prints. Although it had been under the waters of the Isar, it still carried some blurred dabs, but these matched Ray Silver and Conrad Draper only.

‘Not surprising,’ commented Bray. ‘Everyone, especially murderers, would be wearing damn great gloves in December’

The only hope that the laboratory people had been able to offer was that of identifying contact traces from the clothing. Using a miniature vacuum cleaner, which sucked air on to a minute disk of filter material, they collected a quantity of reddish-grey dust from the turn-ups of one of the pairs of trousers that Golding had left behind.

‘What’s this – some other exotic drug?’ asked Benbow when Turnbull showed him the filter pad.

‘No. I haven’t a clue … some of it seems a bit metallic. The boys will let you know as soon as they’ve done a micro and spectography on it.’

True to his word, the liaison officer brought him a report on the Friday morning, the same day that Golding shied away from the flat in Bloomsbury.

‘The dust turned out to be a very finely divided mixture of silver, copper, and nickel,’ said Turnbull.

Benbow stared blankly at him. ‘Why the reddish colour?’

‘That was iron oxide dust … better known as jeweller’s rouge, Archie.’

The Admiral grabbed the form and waved it over his head in mock exultation.

‘Oh joy! And what the hell does all that add up to? Is he a chemist or a metallurgist or something?’

Turnbull waited patiently for Benbow’s bout of exhibitionism to pass off.

‘Looks as if friend Golding has some connection with a place where metal plate is polished – you know, dishes and cutlery. The dust is all either silver itself or copper or nickel, both used as a base for silver plating. Copper was the base for expensive Sheffield plate, but nickel is used now for the cheaper stuff.’

Benbow whistled through his false teeth. ‘He might be in the jewellery or antique trade, you think?’

Turnbull shrugged. ‘That’s up to you – but he’s certainly been standing somewhere where a lot of metal polishing has been carried out – what conclusions you draw from it is your affair.’

‘Was it a lot of dust?’

‘I’d say it was certainly more that would come from a few casual cleanings of the household trophies … of course, he might collect the stuff for a hobby, but even so, the amount we got from his turn-ups was more than a gram – suggests work on almost a commercial scale.’

Bray, hovering in the background, threw in one of his customary wet blankets. ‘An uncle of mine always has the stuff over his trousers – he’s dotty on old silver, but that’s only a hobby – he’s a bank manager.’

Benbow scowled at him.

‘Got any better ideas, sonny? – cause if not, we’ll get down the flat again and see if there’s anything we missed the first twice.’

In the afternoon, they went back to Ferber Street again and went up to Golding’s flat, where a plainclothes man had been on duty ever since they had tracked Snigger to the place. The chief inspector sent the watcher down to keep an eye on the entrance while he and Bray set about searching the rooms for the third time. With the help of Sutcliffe, they went through all the drawers again, examined the furniture for hidden spaces and pulled up all the fitted carpets once more.

The phone rang while they were making a last desperate attack on the cushions and chair seams.

Benbow turned after the phone episode was over and surveyed the chaos in the lounge. In spite of the wrecked appearance, the only actual damage was to the velvet-covered cushions.

‘We can give up the watch on the place now,’ he said gloomily. ‘Golding will be off his lair like a dose of salts after that call – and God knows which end of Britain he’ll hide out in.’

Bray turned to the last chair, a leatherette easy chair with the same brown cushions as the others. He slid his hand down the crack at the side and felt all around.

‘Here’s something … oh hell – a threepenny stamp – big deal!’

He slapped it in disgust onto the mantelpiece and carried on with his destruction of the cushions.

Benbow mooched around the flat again and came back to watch his sergeant finish the job.

‘Sutcliffe has been fishing around in the bathroom – had the lino up and looked down the waste pipes – no joy though.’

‘What are we supposed to be looking for anyway?’ complained Bray.

‘I’ll tell you when we find it,’ said Benbow snappily. The frustration of getting a little bit further and then meeting a brick wall was irritating him more and more as the days went by.

Bray’s fingers felt all along the remaining cracks and into the wadding of the cushion. ‘Damn all!’ he said disgustedly.

Benbow turned away and idly picked up the stamp in his hands.

‘Looks quite new – not even creased,’ he said with a yawn. Then his brows drew together in sudden concentration. ‘Bray – look at this!’

The sergeant took the stamp, turned it over in his fingers and looked questioningly at his chief.

‘Just an unused threepenny stamp – looks new, as you say – but I can’t see what earthly use it is to us.’

‘Can’t you? You try going out of here and buying a stamp like that.’

His voice was suddenly full of bounces and eagerness. Bray stared at the stamp for a few more seconds before the penny dropped.

‘A dragon? A ruddy dragon!’ he exclaimed.

Benbow beamed like a fond father.

‘That’s it, lad – you can only buy those in Wales.’

Back at the Yard, they took the stamp to the lab on the upper floors of the New Building and got someone to make sure that there was nothing extraordinary about the stamp apart from its place of origin.

In his office, Benbow sent for a trade telephone directory for the South Wales area and riffled through the pages eagerly.

‘Why South Wales?’ Bray made his inevitable objection. ‘There’s a North as well, they sell the same stamps there.’

‘Because two-thirds of the population live in the south – we’ve got to start in the most likely places.’

‘And what if some visitor to Golding’s flat happened to drop the stamp? Golding himself still might come from Kent or Westmorland – or even Golders Green!’

Benbow groaned.

‘I’m going to get rid of you, Bray. You get on my bleeding wick … talk about a regular Doubting Thomas. Look, if you don’t make a shot in the dark now and then, you’ll never get to be a rich chief inspector like me, chum.’

He found the pages listing jewellers, antique dealers, and silversmiths. There were less than a score of antique dealers, but well over a hundred jewellers. The Admiral groaned when he saw the list.

‘We’d take a month of Sundays to go through those – let’s have a crack at the antiques boys first.’

‘You can exclude any big shops, combines, and chain store jewellers,’ observed Bray, losing some of his pessimism, ‘Golding would almost certainly be working on his own to be able to go flitting around like he does.’

His chief nodded over the directory. ‘Sure – we can narrow it down to a man with his own business, probably – if there is any business at all, that is.’

‘And we know he’s not a very young man or a really old josser – nor has he got one leg or a hunchback,’ added Bray facetiously.

‘He’s somewhere in his forties, according to the miserable descriptions we’ve had so far,’ agreed Benbow.

He riffled through the pages of the yellow book again. ‘And he’s not very tall, very short, cross-eyed, bearded or bandy, so we want an average-looking bloke of middle age, who runs a silver business and often goes to London for a few days.’

His sergeant’s face suggested that he thought this was Alice in Wonderland stuff, but he managed to keep his tongue still.

Benbow started by phoning the C.I.D. chiefs of the six police forces in the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. He explained what he wanted and asked for their cooperation. This was readily given, though some of the Welsh detectives were politely incredulous.

Benbow confirmed and amplified his requests by Telex to each of the police headquarters, then went home to bed.

The weekend was quiet, nothing being heard from any of the Welsh constabularies.

On the Monday morning, a report from the Newport, Glamorgan County and Merthyr Tydfil forces said that there was no one on the list of dealers who at all resembled Golding in appearance or habits.

In the afternoon, there was a false alarm from the Swansea police force. They thought they had found a jeweller and silversmith who was nondescript enough to be the wanted man and who frequently spent long weekends away from home. But an hour later, a crestfallen detective inspector rang through to say that a tactful series of enquiries had given the man a cast-iron alibi in the shape of an attractive schoolmistress in Gloucester.

The afternoon wore on and Benbow began to feel the accusative eyes of Bray saying, ‘I told you so,’ following him around the little offices. He began to wonder if he had better widen the net to take in the dealers in West and Mid-Wales, but at five o’clock the miracle came across the wires.

‘Cardiff City here … Detective Inspector Parry. We’ve raised a likely candidate for you, seems to fit the bill very well … name of Paul Jacobs. But the chief says to go very careful on this one. If it’s a load of bull he doesn’t want any comeback, thank you very much!’

Bray and Benbow caught the eight o’clock train from Paddington to Wales. The Admiral was bouncing and beaming and his sergeant openly sceptical as the diesel rumbled out of London for the long run westwards.