Hide My Eyes Page 2

  He knocked at the green door and was admitted by a clerk who withdrew as the Superintendent came across the room, hand outstretched.

  Mr. Campion thought he had never seen the man in such tremendous form. Luke was a magnificent specimen who looked a little less than his six feet because of the weight of his muscles. He had a live, dark face under black hair which curled tightly to his scalp, nervous energy radiated from him and his narrow eyes under peaked brows were shrewd and amused.

  “Hello! Just the man I was hoping to see!” he said with disconcerting enthusiasm. “Come in. I was wondering if I could possibly get hold of you to ask you to drop a hint to the Old Man for me. He thinks I’m round the bend.”

  Mr. Campion knew Yeo did, on the very best authority. However he saw no point in mentioning it and Luke gave him little opportunity. His handshake was a minor ordeal and he got his visitor settled in the arm-chair before the desk with the alarming purposefulness of one who perceives a heaven-sent audience.

  “I’m on to something pretty hot,” he announced without preamble. “I’m certain of it but at the moment its just a little bit on the vague side.”

  “That’s a quality which has disadvantages,” murmured Mr. Campion, who knew what they were rather better than most people. “Authority doesn’t warm to the indefinite.”

  “It’s the new rank, I know that.” Luke spoke bluntly. “A Chief can have ideas and a mere D.D.I. is permitted to have a hunch. But a Super is paid to keep his feet on the carpet, his seat on his chair and his head should be a box marked ‘Members Only’. I know that better than anybody and in the ordinary way I believe in it. But just now I really have stumbled on a trail. This is one of my ‘sixth-sense-specials’. I’ve had them all my life. Look, Campion, since you’re here, take a look at this, will you?”

  He turned to a chart which hung on the wall behind him and Mr. Campion, who had heard about it already from Yeo, saw that it was a large-scale street map of a part of the Metropolitan Police District in west London where Charlie Luke had served as a Detective Divisional Inspector for several adventurous years. The thin man remembered most of the areas as a labyrinth of Victorian middle-class stucco which had degenerated with the wars into alarming slums and was now on the upgrade once more, but the portion shown here was new to him. It was a circle, some quarter mile across, in the north of the district and sported a crop of coloured flags as on a battle map. The centre of the round was an irregular patch, coloured green to indicate an open space, which lay in the angle made by the junction of two traffic ways, Edge Street running south to the Park and the long Barrow Road going west. He leaned forward to read the large print across the space.

  “Garden Green,” he said aloud. “I don’t know it, I’m afraid. I thought it was Goff’s Place you were worrying about.”

  Luke cocked an eye at him.

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “You had a word with the Guv on the way up. Did he tell you that I’d got a delusion that Jack Havoc or the Reddingdale Butcher had come back to haunt me because I didn’t bring either of them to trial?”

  “No.” Mr. Campion hoped sincerely that he was lying in a good cause. “I merely gathered you were inclined to link three or four of the unsolved cases of the last three years and to attribute them to the same unknown man.”

  “Huh,” said Luke. “So I am.” He perched himself on the edge of the desk and looked, as Campion had so often seen him, like some huge cat, lithe and intent. “Goff’s Place and the corpse who went by ’bus. Put everything you’ve ever heard about that business out of your mind and listen to me.”

  It was one of Charlie Luke’s more engaging peculiarities that he amplified all his stories with a remarkable pantomimic sideshow which he gave all the time he was talking. He drew diagrams in the air with his long hands and made portraits of his characters with his own face. Mr. Campion was not at all surprised therefore when he hunched himself, drew his lips over his teeth to suggest age and altered the shape of his nose by clapping his fist over it.

  “Poor old Lew,” he said. “A decent, straight little chap with more patience than sense until the end of it was reached of course, when he was firm as a moneylender has to be. He had a pawn shop in Deban Street and when he shut it in the evening he used to nip upstairs to his office and get out his ledgers on the usury lark. His interest was stiff but not over the odds and he’d traded there for years without a complaint.” He paused and fixed his visitor with a baleful eye. “Someone took him for a ride and made a mess of his office first. There was blood all over the floor, at least half a dozen vital books were missing and the trail led down the stairs at the back to a door which opened into Goff’s Place and no one has seen little Lew since. There was a lot of excitement at first but since there was no corpse to show, it petered out.”

  Mr. Campion nodded. “I remember it,” he said, “It was a very wet night and nobody noticed that it was curious that a country ’bus should have been waiting in the yard at a time when there was no performance on at the Duke of Grafton’s. The police decided the body must have been taken away in the ’bus.”

  “The Police had to decide something,” said Luke bitterly. “We had to make up our minds if we were going or coming for one thing. But it must have been done that way otherwise we should have been able to trace the blessed vehicle. We advertised all over the home counties, every police force was alerted, we inspected close on seven hundred garages. Old Lew must have gone in the ’bus, but in that case what was the explanation of the two old dears who were already sitting in it? That was the item which shook me. Who were they? What happened to them? Why did they keep silent and how sound were they sleeping?”

  Mr. Campion’s pale eyes grew thoughtful behind his spectacles. It was very difficult not to be moved by Luke’s forceful imagination which re-created a picture grown faint in his mind.

  “Ah yes,” he said at last. “The old man with the round beard and the old lady with the beads in her bonnet who were dozing on the front seat. Some witness described them, I fancy.”

  “We had five,” Luke said. “Five people came forward to swear that they’d glanced into Goff’s Place that night at varying times between nine-forty and ten-five and had seen the ’bus waiting there. They all remembered the old folk and hardly seem to have noticed anything else, let alone the number or the colour of the coach. Even the waiter who passed the mouth of the yard when the ’bus driver was actually climbing into his seat didn’t glance at him twice but could paint a picture of the passengers in oils. He was the chap who swore he’d seen them before.”

  “Had he, by George? That must have been useful!” The thin man was puzzled. “Extraordinary you got no further. Or wasn’t it?” he added as Luke’s face grew darker.

  “I thought so.” The new Superintendent was inclined to be off-hand. “The chap wasn’t specific. He thought he’d seen them in Edge Street and he was certain it was through glass. He reckoned they must have been sitting in a tea shop and he’d seen them through the window as he passed by.” He hesitated and after a moment’s indecision remarkably unlike him turned and nodded towards the chart on the wall. “Those three yellow flags mark the only eating places in the area where he could have done that.”

  Mr. Campion’s brows rose. He had been warned that Luke was catching at straws.

  “Hardly conclusive,” he ventured.

  Luke sniffed. “Hardly there at all,” he conceded handsomely. “I warn you, my evidence gets thinner still as I go on. That’s one reason why the Old Man is so windy. That blue flag on the corner there marks the branch of Cuppages the cheap outfitters where this was bought in a sale.” He leant over the desk, dragged open a drawer and drew out a thick brown envelope.

  Mr. Campion watched him while he took out the glove it contained. It was cut for a man’s left hand in imitation hogs-kin and was nearly new. Luke’s narrow eyes met Mr. Campion’s squarely.

  “This is the glove left behind in the Church Row shooting case.”

  “Oh de
ar!” Mr. Campion’s protest was so completely spontaneous and like himself that his friend had the grace to colour.

  “All right.” Luke threw the exhibit on the brass tray of a pair of letter scales which he kept on the desk top and it lay there, limp and unimpressive, kept in the air by the small column of weights on the other side. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I only point out that this glove left behind by the unknown gunman who shot his way out of a house in Church Row when he discovered that there were more people in the building than the woman householder, was bought in Cuppages on that corner.”

  “My dear fellow, I wouldn’t dream of arguing with you,” Mr. Campion made it clear that he was not a man who argued at all. “But I would point out that the Church Row shooting happened quite three years ago.”

  “Just about.” Luke spoke cheerfully. “It was about this time, October. The Goff’s place business was last February.”

  “A gap of two years and four months?” Mr. Campion’s expression was very dubious.

  Luke returned to his map. “Well I wondered, don’t you know,” he said deliberately. “I wondered if it was all gap. See that pink marker halfway down Fairey Street, just behind Cuppages? That’s a small jewellers. Belongs to an old boy called Tobias. I’ve known him for years. Not long ago a young woman who was on holiday from Dorset—she’s a country school teacher there—passed by his window and went up in the air. She’d seen this in his cheap tray.” He dived into the drawer again to return with a small box containing a gold ring decorated with ivy leaves which he passed to his visitor. “She’d recognised it as belonging to her auntie and she was excited about finding it because her auntie and uncle completely vanished two years and three months ago—in the June following the September of the Church Row shooting.”

  Mr. Campion sat looking at the Superintendent with misleading innocence.

  “I trust you don’t suggest that the aunt and uncle travelled by ’bus, Charles?”

  “No,” said Luke. “No one knows how they travelled, or even if they travelled. That’s the interesting part of the story. They were retired people, comfortably off in their own little house in Yorkshire, and they sold up and collected all their money and got on a train for London without a word of explanation to anyone except that the old lady, in writing to the school teacher to thank her for a white plastic handbag which she’d sent her for her birthday, had mentioned that they’d met a very nice young man who had told uncle wonderful things about Johannesburg, and how suitable the handbag would be if ever they went. That was all. Auntie never wrote again. When the niece investigated she and uncle had packed up and gone away without a word.”

  He paused and thrust his jaw out with sudden savagery.

  “I don’t want to make cases but you would think that once the police got on to it they could find some trace of these people having taken ’plane or ship within a reasonable time of them closing their bank account. We couldn’t. We can’t find a whisper of them anywhere except that auntie’s ring, which never left her finger, turned up right in the middle of the area in which I’m interested.”

  Mr. Campion looked at the ring. It was not valuable but the design was unusual and rather beautiful.

  “How sure is the niece about this?” he enquired.

  “A hundred per cent.” By some alchemy Luke managed to transform his thin face into a round blank one, solemn eyed and utterly practical. ‘‘Auntie had a terrier pup who used to try to bite it off her finger. Look at it with this.”

  He passed him a jeweller’s glass from the miscellany on the desk and the thin man made the examination carefully.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “What a beastly little tale. What does Tobias say?”

  “So little he must be telling the truth.” Luke sighed gustily. “He can’t remember when the ring came in. He only put it in the window a couple of days before the niece spotted it. He was turning out the drawer in which he keeps the junk he buys over the counter and found it under the bit of newspaper he’d used as a lining last time he cleaned up. He says it must have come in with a parcel of second-hand stuff but he can’t recall it. The odd thing is that the date on the piece of newspaper is just a couple of weeks after uncle and auntie left home. It proves nothing, but it’s curious.”

  He took the ring and dropping it back in its box placed the package on top of the glove. Mr. Campion saw where the manœuvre was leading and decided to be obliging.

  “What about the last flag,” he enquired. “The one in the middle of the green.”

  Luke laughed as he caught his eye.

  “Well, its a good trick,” he said and, returning to the drawer once more, produced a large lizard-skin letter-case of very good quality. He did not pass it over at once but sat turning it inside out and back again, showing a torn strap on one of the inner pockets. “In April this year a kid picked this up from the grass in Garden Green,” he said presently. “After kicking it about for a bit he gave it to a bobby and it turned out to be just the thing the Kent police were looking for. It belonged to a car salesman whose body had been found in his coupé at the bottom of a chalk pit on the Folkestone-London road. Skidmarks on the surface suggested that he’d been forced off the road by another car, so no one was very surprised when it was discovered that he’d been carrying all of seven hundred pounds on him when he set out from the coast. When he was found he had a pocketful of loose change but no note-case of any kind although his other papers were intact. His family identified this. It’s a distinctive wallet and his wife remembered the torn strap.” He let his mouth widen into a ferocious grin and dropped the leather folder on to the glove and the ring. Its weight turned the scales and the brass tray clattered gently as it hit the polished wood of the desk. “There you are,” he said; “it doesn’t mean much but how good it looks?”

  Mr. Campion rose and walked over to the wall to have a closer look at the chart.

  “You haven’t a scrap of evidence of any kind, have you?” he murmured absently. “You’d be more convincing with a crystal ball. I don’t know Garden Green. What is it like?”

  “Sad,” Luke drooped, impersonating a willow perhaps. “Used to be a graveyard. The church came down in the blitz and the Council had the ground levelled and the stones set round the boundary wall. A hoarding separates it from the Barrow Road and round the back there are the usual little houses—beautiful porches, horrible plumbing. Mostly they’re let out in rooms but there are some in private hands still. It’s quiet. Not a slum. This chap I have in mind doesn’t live there, you know.”

  There was something so convinced and familiar in his tone that Mr. Campion was startled. The Superintendent was speaking of someone as real to him as the friend before him. Luke saw the expression in the pale eyes and laughed.

  “I’ve got him under my skin good and proper haven’t I? I worry about him you know. He didn’t make anything out of the Church Row shooting so I figure he had to catch up on auntie and uncle. He got a few hundred quid from them but not enough to square the moneylender who must have been pressing. So he attended to that little problem; but he didn’t actually touch much cash, if any, in Deban Street and therefore, a couple of months later, he gave his mind to the car salesman. I don’t know how long that drop of lolly would last him because I don’t know what his debts were, you see.”

  “This is pure fiction,” said Mr. Campion reproachfully. “It’s fascinating but it doesn’t touch the ground. Why watch Garden Green if he doesn’t live there?”

  “Because he’s treating it as a hide. He’s not counting it. He thinks he’s safe there.” Luke’s deep voice had become soft. It was almost a purr Mr. Campion thought with sudden astonishment, and he was aware of a small and secret thrill creeping down his spine.

  “You can’t tell what he’s got out there,” Luke was saying. “But it’s something which gives him an entirely false sense of security. It could be a pub where they know him well but in some different character to his real one, or it might be a girl friend who
doesn’t ask questions—they do exist they tell me. Anyway he goes there when he wants to leave himself behind. I may sound as if I’m shooting a line but I know his state of mind about that place. He thinks he’s almost invisible there and that things he takes from there or chucks away there couldn’t ever be traced to him.” He paused and his quick dark eyes met Campion’s own, “It’s an old idea—sanctuary they call it, don’t they?”

  Mr. Campion shivered. He did not know why. He hastened back to concrete matters.

  “What about this new telephone?” he enquired.

  The dark man chuckled and nodded towards an instrument which stood away from the others on a file in the corner.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s caused the trouble downstairs. You can go as batty as you like if you do it cheaply, but spend a bit of Government money on your delusions and authority starts having kittens at once! That’s my private line to the Barrow Road station. If anything comes in from the Garden Green beat I shall hear of it quicker than soon. It’s been waiting, costing all of thirty bob, for a couple of weeks but it’ll ring in the end. You’ll see!”

  The thin man in the horn rims returned to his chair and sat down eyeing the little pile of exhibits on the scales.

  “You make it very convincing, Charles,” he said at last. “Although there’s no great similarity of method you force me to admit there’s a strong family likeness in the mental approach. Of course there are no bodies in the ring story but then there isn’t one in the ’bus business either.”

  Luke thrust his hands in his pockets and began to play softly with the coins there.