The Tiger In the Smoke Page 15

  Sudden rage at the wanton destruction of the pretty thing swept over her and she opened her mouth to protest. The words were almost out when a question shot into her mind and stayed there. What was he opening the thing with? She was never certain if she saw the knife, if it caught the light and flashed in the mirror, or if she merely heard the blade biting into the fragile wood, but the words died on her lips and she was suddenly very cold.

  With a final squeal of protest the tiny doors of the cabinet split open. In the looking-glass she saw the man’s shadow contract and then grow large, and she heard his intake of angry breath. Then the empty ruined toy shot through the door into the hall at her feet, and immediately, as though at a signal, the whole world became alive with noise.

  The hammering on the front door was like rolls of thunder. There was an echo of it below in the basement and the shriek of a window flying up somewhere at the back. From all sides came the sound of feet, heavy and hurried on stone, and the unmistakable voices of police demanding admittance.

  Close to Amanda, in the heart of the sudden storm, there was brief but utter silence. Then the candle went out, swept vase and all from the desk, and the stranger came forth.

  She did not see him, but he passed so close that he brushed against her in the whirlwind dark. She caught something of him in that moment, fear and recklessness and a violence which was new in her experience. He fled past her up the stairs, bolting like some huge animal, fleet and silent, into the house above.

  After that it was pandemonium.

  Mr Campion found his wife huddled against the wall on the bottom stair, clutching a broken box like a child on a kerbstone while the thunder of police boots and the flash of police torches made traffic above and around her. He jerked her to her feet and drew her roughly into the comparative safety of the study doorway.

  ‘How damned silly!’ he exclaimed irritably. ‘Really, ducky, how damned silly!’

  Amanda was too experienced a wife to take the outburst as anything but a compliment, but she was very startled to see him at all. For the first time it occurred to her that this avalanche of official aid could hardly be merely the outcome of Meg’s telephone call.

  ‘Oh,’ she said with sudden enlightenment, ‘he was being chased!’

  ‘He was, my dear, and they’ve now got him, I should think, unless you’ve mucked it completely.’ Mr Campion was still angry and his arm was so tightly round her shoulders that he hurt her. ‘Upstairs,’ he said furiously to a uniformed figure who barged in on them. ‘This room’s all right. I’m here.’

  Dozens of men appeared to be stampeding through the house. The noise was outrageous and to a relieved onlooker slightly funny. Amanda laughed.

  ‘What has the poor man got? The Crown Jewels?’

  Campion looked down at her. In her torch beam she saw his eyes round and dark behind his spectacles.

  ‘No, my addle-pated girl,’ he said. ‘He’s got a knife.’ His arm tightened again. ‘Oh, my God, you are an idiot! Why didn’t you come out with Meg? It was because you were in here that we had to rush him. Left alone, he would have walked into the arms of the regulars who would simply have sat outside until he moved.’

  ‘You got Meg’s call then?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ He was contemptuous. ‘We came up just as she reached the ground. Don’t you understand, my dear? It’s so simple. The moment Luke talked to the solicitor we all began to see daylight. A man was sent down to watch the rectory and another to keep an eye on this place. Their two reports came in almost simultaneously. Naturally we were half out of our minds. We thought you must walk in on the fellow. As it happened, it was the other way round. While you were pottering through the house like a couple of lunatics, he was forcing a basement window. He must have arrived just after you came in. Our man out here missed you completely.’

  His voice ended on the triumphant note of one who has put the thing in a nutshell, and Amanda, who had only understood that he was more badly rattled than she had ever seen him, was too polite to comment.

  ‘Let’s have some light,’ she suggested. ‘Have you got some matches? There are some candles on that wall. Be careful how you move. I think he’s been terribly untidy.’

  Campion produced his lighter but he did not let go of her arm, and when the three tapers were casting an elegant radiance over the wreckage of the pretty room he still stood with his arm across her back.

  Amanda considered the damage, her brown eyes pitying.

  ‘What a shame! And also silly. There were no small valuables here yet, no silver or anything.’

  ‘He wasn’t looking for silver,’ said Mr Campion grimly. ‘He was looking for papers. He didn’t find them at the solicitor’s office, so he came here. Hallo?’

  The last word was directed to the doorway, where a drooping figure in a disgraceful old mackintosh stood hesitating.

  ‘Stanis!’ Amanda sounded delighted.

  ‘My dear girl.’ The old man came forward and surprised them all, including himself, by shaking her hand warmly. ‘Dear, oh dear,’ he said, ‘I’m getting old. D’you know, I didn’t like to come in, afraid of what I was going to find. Well well, young woman, you’ve frightened us all very badly, you know. Put the fear of hell in us. Good lord, yes. Well, thank God that’s over.’

  He pulled a chair out and sat down on it, and, pushing his hat on the back of his head, wiped his grey forehead.

  Amanda was gratified but surprised. It was nice to know they were all so fond of her, but the relief seemed a little excessive.

  ‘Have they got him?’ she demanded.

  ‘Eh? I don’t know.’ He smiled his wintry smile at her. ‘I’m such a big policeman now, you know, that I hardly know anything that goes on at all. I leave the footwork to the youngsters. But even if he slips through their fingers now, it won’t be long. At this stage it can hardly be more than a matter of hours. It was you I was worrying about. Why did you want to go and look at a house in the middle of the night? Why don’t you shin up Nelson’s column one evening?’

  ‘Oh, forget her,’ said Campion testily. ‘Where’s Luke?’

  ‘Skipping about the roofs or half-way down the drain.’ Oates was returning to his normal gloom. ‘Yapping like a skeltie, trying to do everybody else’s work. That fellow’s angry, Campion. He’s been touched on the raw. He’s what the village I was born in used to call “wholly riled”. I like to see it. I like to know a man has it in him. Yet it always makes me nervous. I don’t want him doing anything with his bare hands, so to speak. We have to be very dignified, we senior dicks.’

  A remark neither dignified nor even particularly senior, although it possessed a certain colourful sophistication, floated in to them from the hall, and a few moments later the D.D.C.I. appeared. He came stalking in, coat skirts flying, his fingers rattling the change in his pockets and his diamond eyes glowering. At once the little room became grossly overfurnished.

  ‘Lost him,’ he announced, throwing up great hands in a fine impressionist sketch of flight. ‘We shall get him in the next hour or two. We can’t help doing that. If we continue to be lame, blind, half-witted, and cloth-eared for the rest of our naturals, we shall pick him up. Alive too, if we don’t crush him to death getting out of each other’s way. Twenty-five men! Twenty-five men of various branches, counting five drivers and six senior officials, and what happens? The bloke slides out of the bathroom window, the only one in the house which hadn’t got a dick sitting under the sill, and leaps into the fog. He has to jump blind, the night is thick as canteen coffee, and does he kill himself dropping on to the spiked railings round the area? Does he hell!’

  He had been talking to Oates all the time, but not openly. Ostensibly his remarks had been addressed to Amanda, whom he did not know very well.

  At this point he condescended to recognize her for the first time.

  ‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ he said with a brief smile, ‘but Campion here has gone down in my estimation socially. He’s not the
nob I thought he was. He just took on like any other common chap. “Get her out! Get her out!” No old-school-tie stiff-upper-lip stuff there. I couldn’t have behaved worse myself.’ He laughed abruptly at her amazed expression, which he mistook for embarrassment. ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. We should have lost him anyway. We should have lost him if there had been enough of us to play ring-a-ring-of-roses all round the building, or if we’d been allowed to shoot on sight. We’d have missed him because we under-estimated him. We just weren’t thinking in his class.’

  Oates cocked an eye at him. ‘He observed your man, knew you’d be on your way, took the risk of carrying his project through before you got here, and marked that one window as the one you didn’t guard because you’d estimate the drop as unnegotiable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did anyone see him at all?’

  ‘Two uniformed men saw a shadow and went after it like good ’uns. But he melted. The whole area is alive with us now. It’s like looking for a flea in a bust feather bed.’

  Oates nodded. ‘He’s got nerve and he’s got quality. I grant him that.’

  ‘Likewise spring heels and rubber bones.’ Luke spoke grudgingly. ‘I shouldn’t like to attempt that drop myself, in daylight. I don’t suppose the lady happened to see him?’

  ‘I?’ Amanda shook her head regretfully. ‘No, only as a shadow in the looking-glass. He was in here, you see, and I was out there at the foot of the stairs.’

  She noticed that she was causing a sensation and was deeply puzzled by it.

  ‘I can’t describe him either, I’m afraid, because it was so dark. I only saw his back in some sort of rough coat, light buff I think.’

  ‘Buff?’ They were on her at once, eager with inquiry.

  ‘I think so. I couldn’t swear to it.’

  ‘It wasn’t a navy raincoat, anyway?’

  ‘No. It was lightish.’

  ‘Any hat?’

  She hesitated. ‘I can’t remember any brim,’ she said, ‘and yet I don’t remember any hair either. My impression is that he had a round, tight sort of head. The thing I do remember and the thing I’d know again is the extraordinary atmosphere of the man, if that’s the right word. He was urgent, somehow, rather like you, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘That’s Havoc,’ exclaimed Oates, highly delighted. ‘You can’t go saying that in evidence, Amanda, but it satisfies me. Don’t misunderstand us, Luke my boy, but I know what she means. He’s an extraordinarily vital animal. He’s got force.’

  Luke hunched his shoulders. ‘I don’t know about force,’ he said bitterly. ‘Just give me his direction. I’m not saying I’ve not got plenty to go on. His prints were all over the solicitor’s office, and I don’t doubt they are here. He’s leaving a trail like a drag hunt. We’re bound to get him before dawn. But meanwhile there’s four people dead who ought to be alive, one of them a famous man, and another of ’em one of the best kids who ever lived. When this is over I’ve got to go and see Coleman’s old mum. He was her only one and she hoped he’d turn out like me, God help her. Four murders in my manor since six tonight and the chap jumps quietly out of a ring of us.’

  He stuck his long right forefinger through a circle made of his left hand, and took a swinging grab at it with his right fist. It was an expressive illustration, but its point was lost in an uncharacteristic explosion from Amanda, whose brown eyes had become wide and horrified.

  ‘That man murdered four people tonight? You didn’t tell us. Meg and I might have been killed.’

  Her reaction was so angry, and so exactly an echo of their own earlier performances, that it punctured the emotional tension like a bubble. Mr Campion began to laugh and Oates joined him. Amanda remained furious, her flaming hair no redder than her cheeks.

  ‘I think we might have been told,’ she said. The unreason of the statement occurred to her the moment it had escaped her, and her expression grew blank. ‘I say, how horrible,’ she said in an altered voice. ‘Who is he? A maniac?’

  ‘Not if I know it.’ Luke was softly ferocious. ‘No psychiatrist is going to get him off through that door. He’ll see the inside of the topping-shed when I get hold of him.’

  ‘And you think you’ll get him soon?’ Amanda spoke absently. She was shivering and she glanced behind her into the shadows.

  ‘Luke will get him soon.’ Oates stirred in his chair. He looked very mild and elderly sitting there, the candle-light falling on his close-cropped head, but his voice was chill with certainty. ‘The animal is trapped,’ he said. ‘Nothing can save him. He has a start on us, but now that the machine has gone into action the odds against him are lengthening every hour. By this time his record has been studied. That means that every living soul who has ever been known to have anything to do with him is going to be contacted, questioned, and kept under observation. For instance, we know he had a visitor in prison. So far that woman (she’s a lodging-house keeper in Bethnal Green) has not heard from him since he escaped. She won’t hear. She won’t have a chance. All her associates will be examined. He’ll have no help there.’

  ‘He picked up a knife somewhere,’ grumbled Luke, ‘and a buff hairy coat. He was in issue clothes when he escaped.’

  ‘That was at the beginning.’ Oates still spoke mildly. ‘You’ll find that phase is over. From now on he must become more and more alone. I’ve seen it happen again and again. Quietly and steadily the holes are stopped, the net grows smaller and smaller. Now he has reached the stage when he can never take another step knowing it to be a safe one. He can never enter another room, never turn another corner, without taking his life in his hands.’ He paused and regarded them with cold grave eyes. ‘Tomorrow, if he has not been taken, we shall probably offer a reward. An enterprising newspaper will double it at once. After that he’ll never be able to trust another living soul.’

  Luke breathed heavily through his long nose. ‘Fair enough, but we ought to have taken him tonight. This was our best bet. He’ll keep away from Mrs Elginbrodde and her friends now, whatever he’s looking for.’

  Amanda was astonished. ‘Why Meg? What is he looking for?’

  ‘Some documents,’ said Campion. ‘Something to do with Martin. He went for Martin’s file at the solicitor’s.’

  He made the explanation briefly and his hand on her arm tightened, warning her to be discreet. She nodded, but her next question was unfortunate.

  ‘What happened to Geoffrey?’

  ‘You may well ask.’ Luke’s bright eyes were very keen. ‘Not a murmur from that young man since he went down an alley with a crook who was picked up dead soon after. There’s another person who can vanish like smoke.’

  Campion’s restraining hand became even heavier. ‘My dear,’ he murmured with an old-fashioned primness which was becoming increasingly noticeable in him as he grew older, ‘you and I are going home. If Luke needs either of us he knows where to find us – as he would say himself – at the old address. Meg has been taken home to the rectory, where there are quite a dozen good people anxious to comfort her. We have got to get across the town to Bottle Street somehow in this fog and I feel the time has come when we should try.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Amanda quickly and she slid her arm through his.

  They left the sad little house to Luke and his minions, who had a great deal of work to do, but had some difficulty in escaping from Oates, who had made up his mind to give them a lift in the official limousine of which he was so vain. Salvation came unexpectedly when they got outside to find Mr Lugg was waiting in Mr Campion’s sister’s remarkable landau. The fat man had been thoroughly frightened and was reacting in the popular way. He was in truculent mood.

  ‘’Op in the back of this ’ere ’at-box,’ he said briefly, his moonface scowling at them through the choking gloom. ‘It only took me two hours to get ’ere, but at any rate no one could see what I was in and laugh. ’Ow did you expect me to find you – second sight?’

  Amanda climbed
into the warm cabin with relief. Val’s town car, if highly individual, was extremely comfortable. She had supervised the renovation of the fine old Daimler herself and had achieved a modern gaiety of décor which was part her practical self and part Dali. The glass partition between the driver and the passengers had been removed, and the upholstery, carried out in olive-green and an intelligent maroon, was openly reminiscent of Georgian backstairs livery, so that the vehicle had been rechristened by the family The Running Footman. It was very gay and gallant and pleasant to escape to.

  Amanda pulled the saffron rug round her and sighed.

  ‘Bless you, Magers,’ she said. ‘How did you do it? Telephoned the police station, I suppose?’

  ‘Not me. I don’t stick me ’ead into every narks’ nest I ’ear of, like some people.’ He leant over the back and pushed the door wide for Campion. ‘If it ’adn’t been for that Mrs Elginbrodde – wot a smashereeno, eh! – ’oo come up outside the rectory in a police car looking like a jool in a sink-tidy, I’d be sitting in the square still. She told me quite enough to go on with. Why don’t you stick to aeroplanes? They’re safer and they’re class. Murders is mud and always ‘as been. Don’t forget it.’

  He cast a baleful glance at his employer, who was at last inside.

  ‘You’re quite content, I suppose?’ he inquired. ‘Up to the oxters in blood and ’appy as a lark.’

  Mr Campion regarded him coldly. ‘Where’s Rupert?’

  ‘Mindin’ the telephone. That’s where Sexton Blake is.’ Lugg settled himself behind the wheel. ‘’E and the dorg give me the only ’elp I get. I give them the nightwatchman as a runner.’

  He let in the clutch with a sigh and pulled out silently into the fog.