Читать книгу Seven Sins - Arthur Henry Ward - Страница 3
ОглавлениеBlack-Out in Babylon
In a somewhat oddly appointed room a man was listening to the nine o'clock news bulletin.
The apartment, in addition to a super radio set, also boasted a large dressing-table with wing mirrors and two tall wardrobe cabinets of the kind seen in a modiste's establishment. There were several trunks and other items of baggage, a camp bed and three ornate gilt chairs; there was a dictaphone and there was no carpet on the floor. Walls from which musty gray paper hung like elephants' ears; nails of unknown purpose protruding from unpainted woodwork; a nearly black ceiling: these things did not make harmony with the costly appointments. This room did not add up.
The man seated on one of the three chairs wore a shabby blue suit with a muffler in lieu of a collar. His hands were dirty and he displayed a two days' beard on his chin. His nose was expensively colored. A small cap, having a greasy peak, rested on the back of his head, to expose a mop of uncombed reddish brown hair resembling a dying dahlia.
His behavior was not without interest. He was attaching a fitting to connect the radio with the dictaphone. When the bulletin came to its rather anaesthetic end, the man pressed a control and the cylinder began to revolve.
"To-night's postscript," said the announcer, "will be by Sir Giles Loeder—and here he is."
Sir Giles Loeder was one of the most popular political broadcasters in England: he had the art of driving home his points to a mixed audience. Formerly member for North Tiverton (Independent), he had resigned his seat soon after the outbreak of war in order to be able to devote more time to what he then described as "direct aid." In fact, he was chairman of so many committees, contributor to such a number of influential journals, and so tireless a radio speaker that his departure from the House of Commons seemed to be wholly justified.
Certainly, the man with the greasy cap gave undivided attention to Sir Giles' remarks, sometimes stopping the record during a sentence or two and then starting it again as if anxious to capture the next phrase. At the conclusion of the postscript, he disconnected his apparatus, put the cylinder in a box and the box in a drawer, and switched the light off.
An uncarpeted stair, which he negotiated with the aid of a torch, enabled him to reach the ground floor and to step into a mews where a deserted taxicab was standing. Climbing to the driver's seat, he pulled out into Windmill Street.
One curious enough, and able, to have followed him, would have learned that he drove at speed, ignoring would-be fares, through the black-out mysteries of Soho and straight up deserted Regent Street. Half way along in spite of his tactics, a pair of unusually determined wanderers appeared from nowhere and ran out to head him off. They were Australian gunners.
"Say, chum, what's the hurry? We need you."
"Can't be done, mates. See—me flag's dahn. I'm bespoke by a gent at the B.B.C."
Whether this reference to the British Broadcasting Corporation, or the man's glittering Cockney, impressed the Diggers may never be known; but they allowed him to proceed unmolested.
The prevalent scarcity of taxis did not facilitate his plans, however. Just outside a Tube station he was delayed by traffic lights, and before he could utter a word of protest, a girl who wore a chiffon cape over a brief dance frock opened the offside door and got in.
"'Alf a mo!" said the man. "'Alf a bloomin' mo!"
He directed the ray of a lamp into the interior; and he saw there a remarkably pretty brunette whose smiling glance caressed him. Her beauty was confident in its young inexperience, and the velvet brown eyes glowed with conquest: she would have attracted a cultured woman-hunter—or a novice.
"Please don't say you're engaged. I simply must get to the B.B.C."
"Oh! the B.B.C? That's different—" and an appreciative grin spread over the driver's unshaven face, a grin which revealed flashing white teeth. "I'm goin' there."
He drove on, and at the entrance to Broadcasting House the pretty brunette jumped out and fumbled in her bag.
"No charge, lady. Me flag's dahn. Also—it's a pleasure. A smile like yours is worth more than a bob."
And this highly unusual taximan moved away and took his stand in darkness outside the Temple of British radio, a darkness fitfully, and startlingly, dispersed whenever high, fleeting clouds unveiled the harvest moon.
Rather less than four hours later, an interesting conversation took place between two men in an office which, when not blacked-out, overlooked the Thames Embankment.
"Ye will have obsairved foreby," said the taller man, and his accent was impressive, "unless ye bought the evening paper as a pipe lighter, that there's a marked decrease o' crime in the West End of London."
He turned hazel eyes, which had an almost leonine quality, in the direction of a smaller man who leaned against a mantelpiece staring vacantly down into an empty grate.
The speaker, large framed, gaunt, his graying hair cropped at the sides of a square, mathematical forehead, and wearing a moustache so closely trimmed as to produce the effect of an unshaven upper lip, might have suggested to some the figure of a Covenanter born out of his generation.
The bare room in which he sat behind a bare desk (it contained a pewter inkpot and pens, a blotting pad, a calendar, a writing block, a wire basket and a telephone) was furnished with such severe simplicity that, excepting the desk and a framed print of Lord Trenchard over the mantelpiece, four chairs and a hatrack would have completed the inventory. This was the Scotland Yard office of Chief Detective Inspector Firth, and the tall man was the celebrated Chief Inspector.
"That's right," remarked the smaller man.
From a pocket of his sports jacket he withdrew a tightly rolled copy of an evening newspaper, glanced at it, rolled it up even more tightly and put it back into another pocket. Red faced, clean shaven, with surprised sandy hair, this was the Chief Inspector's assistant, Detective-sergeant Bluett.
He was never seen without an evening paper; indeed, it was believed that he invariably slept with a Final Edition under his pillow. There was no evidence to show that he ever read one.
"It would be grand news for the likes o' you and me," said Firth—"if it happened to be true." Big Ben, which sounded as though it stood directly outside the darkened window, chimed the half-hour. "Half past one in the morning—and we're still at it. What's more, a wasted night."
Sergeant Bluett produced the rolled newspaper, glanced at it and put it back in the original pocket. "There was a girl dancing at the Green Spider," he pointed out, "with nothing on but her shoes."
"I ha' small doubt," the Chief Inspector commented, "that had ye mentioned your disapproval, she would ha' been glad to take them off. The naked women o' Babylon concern the Church; they are no affair o' this department. A decrease in crime? Wi' black-out thugs, two unsolved murders, and a new and highly efficient cat-burglar in the West End."
"That's right."
"Millions behind the black market, the gambling racket taking more money than Monte Carlo; a big spy ring sending news to Berlin before it's known to the Hoose o' Commons. A decrease in crime!"
He rested his elbow on the blotting pad, pressing tips of long, sensitive fingers together and exposing his angular wrists.
"I mind me of Port Said, where a wee job led me some whiles ago. A cleaner, quieter little bit of a town no man could wish to see. But my opposite number there took me underground. Weel, weel! The black-out has done just that to crime in London:—driven it underground."
"I'm glad the spy game isn't in my hands," remarked Sergeant Bluett. "Mr. Gaston Max is welcome to his job."
"Gaston Max is a most acceptable confrère. Owing to what he calls a wee misunderstanding wi' Vichy, he's now one o' us. He has a brilliant record wi' the Paris police, and in my opeenion is the best detective in Europe."
Sergeant Bluett withdrew the evening paper and rerolled it almost fiercely. "He gets far more rope from the Chief than we do. We have to stick to the book of the words; he sings his own sweet song."
"Such was the arrangement. And until he has proven himself, it isna' for us to creeticise a clever officer."
"He looks more like a clever comic to me. As for the marvellous Paris methods we've heard so much about, I should say they're twenty years out of date."
"That's as may be. But his English compares verra favorably wi' your French."
"H'm—" the evening paper disappeared into a pocket of Bluett's grey trousers—"I'm none too sure about the French these days. You've only got to look at their history to see what I mean."
"French history has its dark spots, Bluett. But I could remark that England has black patches. I was thinking about the execution o' King Charles."
"Scotland too," said Bluett helpfully. "I was thinking about the massacre of Glencoe."
The 'phone buzzed. Sergeant Bluett groaned. Chief Inspector Firth, frowning, took up the instrument.
"Yes, sir. Firth here." He framed his lips in an unspoken word, whereby Sergeant Bluett became aware of the fact that the caller was Assistant Commissioner Colonel J.N.G. O'Halloran—affectionately known as Jingo, and probably the most popular of Scotland Yard's senior officers. "Sergeant Bluett is in my office. Yes, sir,—I will be along at once."
The Chief Inspector replaced the receiver and stood up, revealing his great height and the fact that he wore a Harris tweed suit which his tailor might with justice have claimed to be well cut, assuming that it had been cut for a smaller customer. Firth smiled grimly, and because he had a slightly undershot jaw, when he smiled one saw his lower teeth.
"Back to the streets o' Babylon," he said. "Wi' this decrease in crime, our work is never done."
