Читать книгу Nighthawks! - John G. Brandon - Страница 6

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IN a very pleasant lounge-bar and buffet situate in a small street off the south side of Shaftesbury Avenue, Detective-Inspector Richard Frayne sat at a small table fortifying himself after the labours of a tiring and, in general, totally unsatisfactory day.

It had been a wearisome round, one which had dragged him to nearly every point of London’s compass from the West End to Limehouse Reach, from there up-river to quaint old-world Strand-on-the-Green, by Kew Bridge, to finish up at about eight o’clock not so very far from Deptford.

A day of interrogation approached by every devious and tortuous angle the mind of the Inspector could mentally devise to extract information, but met in each and every instance by tortuosity equally skilled in evasion. Either that or a blank vacancy, as maddening as it was impenetrable.

And big things were at issue. Dope-running on the grand scale in quantities such as had never before been attempted. Customs and the river-police were at their wits’ end. Ship after ship had been searched, avenue after avenue of possible means of distribution explored, but always the result was the same: so far only a blank wall beyond which there seemed to be no penetrating. Where it came from, how it was worked ashore, and into whose hands it finally went for peddling in small lots remained, after months of work, three insoluble mysteries. The whole working of the thing was sheer, undiluted genius, showing organization of the highest order, and co-operation of a kind not often found in criminal ventures. Everything pointed to the existence of a cosmopolitan gang whose ramifications spread over many continental ports but whose headquarters were in London. But, that admitted, not one single thing else pointed anywhere. As for one solid tangible fact to incriminate any single individual ... nothing at all. After four months of the closest ferreting, Dick Frayne was no nearer applying for a warrant for any specific individual than he had been on the day he was given charge of the investigation.

Certainly, there was this; he must have got, unknown to him, close enough to the heart of things to have scared the runners. For a week or two there had been a complete cessation of the deadly white stream into the West End at any rate. The provincial police also reported a marked decrease of the supply. Had he only been able to know just at which stage of his probing around he had put the wind up them, there might have been some chance of following up. As it was ...

It was in a slightly dejected frame of mind that, somewhere approaching nine o’clock, he found himself deposited at the Charing Cross Road end of Shaftesbury Avenue. An unfortunate time, too late to dine at his usual restaurant, and too early by a good hour to take supper there.

Upon the horns of a dilemma, and with his inner man crying aloud the fact that, beyond a sandwich at a riverside pub along Greenwich Reach, it had received no attention since breakfast, there suddenly recurred to his mind mention of a place near by where he could get as good oysters as any in London, when the succulent bivalve was in season. A glance at his bus and tube crumpled clothes in the door mirror of a neighbouring modiste, made up his fastidious mind for him—he would explore the unknown. Which, it struck him, was an unusual thing for him in the West End where he lived, worked, and knew, he had thought, every square foot of ground. He expected when he did discover the place it would prove to be an old haunt, known to him but temporarily forgotten, where, doubtless, through mirrors or in any other way but eye to eye frankly, more than one of his old ‘clients’ would be furtively—and uneasily—eyeing his advent, and still more anxiously awaiting his departure.

Upon arrival, however, he found matters to be entirely the reverse of his anticipation. One cursory glance around the circular bar, the smaller one at the rear where edible delicacies were obtainable, the smaller tables occupied by a chattering crowd of both sexes, revealed to his keen eye no worse company than the smaller fry of the cinema world. Small-part people, ‘extra ladies and gentlemen’ of the better class, here an assistant producer (anxiously watched) on the look-out for ‘types’ called for by his director, there a little group of camera men discussing earnestly their particular angle of the business.

There were others to be seen of obviously a lower strata, professionally—dwellers upon the fringe of the silver screen. An animated and well-dressed people, youth and good looks predominating for the greater part; though here and there were to be seen older, careworn faces, male and female, whose owners had made careful and skilful effort to conceal the ravages hardship and the years had wrought.

Strange types, though, he found himself thinking as he loitered over his oysters; but he supposed that was only natural in a business where a person to be of any value at all had to be able to represent convincingly anything and everything but what he or she actually was. Decent people enough, they seemed; a bit too much given to the first person singular as a topic of conversation, perhaps, but otherwise ...

It occurred to him also that they must be fairly good plucked ’uns, both men and women, to carry on their uphill battle day after day, year in, year out, even when all hope of ever achieving fame—or even reasonable security of living—must have long since vanished.

Precarious sort of existence; hard enough for men, but how the women managed in the long spells of unemployment he understood they periodically had to endure was beyond him. Yet they all seemed bright, jaunty, and well turned out ... most of them, at any rate.

Here and there, though, the experienced eye of the Inspector caught bolder, harder ones; sisters of a profession as old as civilization, but in this place and company decorum itself. There, he thought pityingly, with possibly some vague hope, deep at heart, of exchanging the ghastly mockery of life which is the one trade, for the tawdry imitation of it which is the other. Poor creatures—no one knew better than he did the wretchedness of their bedizened existences.

But from his professional point of view all innocuous enough. Young or old, prosperous or otherwise, all harmless enough in so far as any predatory intention towards their fellow-man were concerned. None of the furtive-eyed brigade to be found here.

But you couldn’t mistake them for what they were, he mused: a folk quite apart from the ordinary workaday world. Put them in a crowd and a discerning eye could pick them out one by one with absolute certainty. Their vocation was stamped upon them as it was upon—he was obliged to smile at the simile—the average policeman.

Of which it might be said that, could it be taken as a general rule, then most assuredly Detective-Inspector Frayne was the exception needed to prove it. For he might be anything in the wide world that a good-looking, meticulously dressed and groomed man of three and thirty might be—other than what he actually was.

Yet it was barely ten years—and after three years of active service abroad—that young Dick Frayne had set out upon his first ‘beat’ with L Division, Metropolitan Police, clad in the familiar blue uniform. Demobbed, jobless, and with a widowed mother to support—a mother, by the way, who had denied herself most things to give her son an education—he had joined ‘the force’ in sheer desperation. His rapid rise had been one of the romances of that not altogether romantic service.

He himself would have assured you that it had all been blind luck; ‘the breaks,’ to use a quaint Americanism, had come his way. But there were others, high up at Headquarters, who would have speedily demolished that modest theory; who would have assured you with much greater force that luck, undoubted factor as it was in the careers of young men, did not take them out of blue and install them for intensive training for the Special Service Branch of the C.I.D. Luck might do that sort of thing at other Police Headquarters of great cities, but not at New Scotland Yard. Neither did luck jump a man to sergeant in three years and an Inspectorship in seven. Not so. To the red brick establishment upon Westminster Embankment not so many uniformed men were called, and of them few, mighty few, were chosen. Not, at any rate, for such delicate work as was the peculiar province of Detective-Inspector Richard Frayne.

Listening to the snatches of earnest conversation that drifted to his keen ears under the lighter chatter and badinage, he found himself comparing his present company with others of greater fame, or notoriety, that he had met. He had acquaintances of both sexes connected with the theatrical and other kindred arts, but they were amongst the more favoured of their kind; people to be seen, or read of, mostly in company of leaders of the smartest set, habitués of the most exclusive and expensive night-clubs. He rather fancied he liked these struggling brethren the better. They at least did not ape anything, nor did they exhibit any desire to be known for anything but just what they were.

Stray words he heard from here and there; words that told of desperate struggle not to be crushed out altogether. Of hard work, repaid often by failure, to recommence the fight again with aching, anxious hearts undaunted by whatever knocks their game brought them. Good luck to them, he thought.

Glancing around, his eye fell upon one whom he noticed for the first time. Not that she was not by far quite the most striking personality in that place, but she had been seated at a solitary table in a rather shadowed corner, and also a little party in front had obscured her completely from the angle at which he sat.

She was, even in this coterie of pretty and vivacious women, a thing entirely apart. There was nothing of prettiness about her, and of vivacity at the moment she showed little; but she was, beyond any question, one of the loveliest creatures he ever remembered to have set eyes upon. And she was not of this set; there could be no mistaking that. She no more belonged to it than did he himself—a more or less prosaic police-officer. There was about her an unmistakable air of breed—and something more. Her dress proclaimed her to be a woman of exquisite taste and, he would have wagered, considerable means. It was equally obvious, by the curious glances he saw flung at her, that she was as strange to the habitués of the place as he himself. Who was she and what was she doing there? Some social aspirant for film fame who had heard of this rendezvous, and fancied that here might be found some one to help her towards that end?

He saw that she had upon the table before her a small glass of some liqueur; but it was as yet untasted. In all probability unwanted; merely an excuse for retaining her seat.

He would have said, principally from her clear yet rich olive-coloured skin and limpid, dark brown eyes, that she was foreign, or at least of foreign extraction. Spanish, perhaps ... or, still more likely from the general perfection of her grooming and gowning, Vienna. The beautiful face had a sad cast at moments, though; a strained look—possibly nothing but preoccupation over the little batch of letters she had taken from her handbag and from time to time perused earnestly. Now and again she leaned back in her chair with half-closed eyes, a cigarette burning idly away in an unusual jade holder she held in a long and perfectly shaped hand. At such moments that strained look was more marked than ever. Well, whoever she might be, he thought, she was something right out of the ordinary.

Common politeness demanding that he should not sit there staring at her as though she were something on show, Dick Frayne very reluctantly turned his attention elsewhere, and in doing so made acquaintance with quite the most curious pair of ‘types’ he had noted up to the present. They were seated immediately behind the beautiful lady of his interest, so much so that when she leaned back in her chair, not more than a couple of inches separated the backs of their three heads.

These particular two, he thought, must also be something out of the ordinary, for a queerer looking pair of customers it would have been hard to find. The one was short, squat and fat; yet never for a moment did he give any other impression than that of a tremendously powerful man. The breadth of his shoulders was prodigious; topped by a neck that for wrinkled thickness and physical power, would not have disgraced a bull. But it was the extraordinary formation of the man’s head which constituted his greatest peculiarity. It was exactly the shape, from dome to chin, of an egg stood upright upon its thick end—and as destitute of hair. The face gave the impression of a broad, flat expanse, entirely colourless and equally expressionless, save for tiny black eyes that gleamed against the whiteness surrounding them like two black agates. Of either brows or lashes he was entirely destitute. A ‘type’ indeed, the Inspector thought, and wondered just what particular kind of parts he distinguished himself in portraying.

His companion was not so difficult to place, professionally. If the tall, thin man with the lean, tight, skinned, and more than ordinarily dark-complexioned face, were not usually cast for the villain of the piece, or picture, then Dick Frayne had not the first idea of such things. He was, so far as could be seen immaculately attired in evening clothes, over which he was wearing an overcoat. In one of his eyes a rimless and cordless monocle was worn; it added, if anything, to their sinister expression, and they, in the opinion of the Scotland Yard man, wanted nothing additional to their natural appearance of cold hostility. Hard, glittering eyes; full of fire yet strangely inscrutable, cold as ice. To which was to be added the tightest-lipped and wickedest-looking mouth Frayne ever remembered to have seen.

Yet, curiously enough, there was nothing furtive about him; nothing of the usual attempt of the professional crook to hide both a criminal record and predatory intentions under a cloak of sleek, well-bred respectability. There was nothing of professional persuasiveness about the gentleman. Even as he was speaking, and vehemently at that, to his singular companion, his dark eyes kept roving about the room and there was no mistaking the emotion behind them: sardonic contempt for everything and every one upon whom they fell. Yet, Frayne ruminated, watching him, doubtless a most decent, hard-working chap if one knew him. But just on account of a freak of facial structure—and a natural air of crime and high misdemeanour upon, the grand scale—he was condemned to be the villain upon each and every appearance. Well, he most certainly looked the part, and apparently he was so saturated in his villainy that he carried it about with him all his waking hours.

At which point the Inspector permitted himself another glance at an infinitely more inspiriting subject; the unconsciously beautiful creature seated back to back to these two striking worthies.