He said, “Where have all the pictures gone?”
Eed stared at him over the rim of her glass, and then giggled. “You’ve been here before, I can see that. They took ‘em down this afternoon for cleaning.”
“I noticed the faded patches on the walls. What are they?”
“Photographs. The usual sort of thing. They’re a bit rude, actually.”
“They must have heard that I was coming,” said Mr. Behrens.
Eed looked at him curiously. She thought that he was an odd ’un. She had put him down at first as a sugar daddy, but now she was not sure. There was a curious hardness about his eyes and mouth, which contradicted his appearance of grumpy middle-aged benevolence.
“A doctor once told me,” said Mr. Behrens, “that too much champagne is bad for the lining of the stomach. Let’s have a change.”
He picked up the wine list, signalled to the waiter and said, “I should like a glass of this brandy.” He indicated the most expensive drink on the list. “And I’m sure this young lady will join me.”
“You can only die once,” said Eed.
The waiter said, “I’m sorry, sir, we are out of stock of that brandy.”
Mr. Behrens moved his finger up the wine list. “Armagnac, then,” he said.
“I
think
,” said the waiter, “that we are out of that too. I could find out.”
“Don’t bother,” said Mr. Behrens. He seemed to have lost interest in the topic.
“A little more champagne, sir?”
“Not at the moment.” He turned to Mr. Absalom, and said, “I hope that lovely car we came in isn’t going to be stolen.”
“How should it be?”
“Soho is a dishonest quarter. Or so I have always understood. I don’t come here much, in the ordinary way.”
“The men will look after it.”
“They will find it difficult to do so,” said Mr. Behrens. “Unless they have periscopic eyes. Both of them are drinking at that table in the corner.”
Mr. Absolom uttered an angry exclamation, jumped up and went over to the table. Mr. Behrens saw him expostulating with the men, one of whom got up and walked out. Mr. Absalom rejoined them.
“It was right of you to point it out to me,” he said. “I shall report the men to the head of Chancery. They had no right to come in together. One should certainly have stayed with the car.”
“There is very little discipline among young men today,” said Mr. Behrens sadly. “If you will excuse me for a moment—”
He got up and made his way into the foyer. A thickset man in a dinner jacket was standing there. He wasn’t exactly guarding the exit, but he was within easy reach of it.
“I would like to use your telephone,” said Mr. Behrens. “An urgent call.”
The man considered the matter, running his hand down a chin which looked as if it had already been shaved twice that day and was about ready for a third scrape. He said, “There’s a telephone up there.”
He pointed to stairs at the end of the passage.
Mr. Behrens thanked him, and walked along the passage, conscious of the man’s eyes focused like twin gun barrels on the small of his back. The stairs were carpeted, and led up to a hallway which was on ground-floor level at the back of the building. There were three doors on either side of the passage, but no sign of a telephone.
As Mr. Behrens was hesitating, the middle door on the left-hand side of the passage opened and a man came out. He was a big man, bulky but not fat, with skin the colour of
crême caramel
and black hair set in tight varnished waves.
Mr. Behrens said, “The man downstairs—um—told me I would find a telephone up here. I—um—see no telephone. A most important call—”
“You could use the telephone in my office if you wished, sir.”
“That’s very good of you,” said Mr. Behrens. He followed him in. “You would be the manager, I take it? I hardly like to trouble you in the middle of such a busy evening.”
“All evenings are busy here. That telephone is through to Exchange.”
“But it’s not every night that you have to anticipate a police raid, I imagine,” said Mr. Behrens.
“What makes you think we’re anticipating a raid, sir?”
“I noticed that you had removed all the—um—exciting pictures from the walls downstairs. And most of the exciting drinks, too. I suppose those are the sort of things that get damaged, or perhaps lost, when you have a lot of heavy-handed policemen about the place.”
Mr. Behrens was holding the receiver in one hand as he spoke, and was watching the manager’s face. He saw the calculating expression in his eyes, and that was all he did see before the ceiling fell on him and the room rolled slowly over, twice, and dissolved.
Mr. Calder was sitting on a hard chair in an almost unfurnished room next to the superintendent’s office in Carver Street police station.
When Mr. Behrens had telephoned him from the airport, he had suggested West End Central police station as a rendezvous. They both knew Chief Superintendent Park, head of the CID there, and had worked with him on many occasions.
When Mr. Calder reached West End Central, after crawling for three hours through the fog, abandoning his car in a garage at New Cross and finishing the journey by train, he found a message from the Savoy waiting for him. It said that the party was apparently going on to a night club in Soho, and it suggested that Mr. Calder go to Carver Street, which is the sub-station directly concerned with this area.
When Mr. Carver arrived at Carver Street, he realised that the move had been a mistake. The superintendent in charge had behaved with perfect correctness. He had accepted Mr. Calder’s credentials, backed as they were by a message from his own chief, but he had made it quite plain that he regarded the position with disfavour. He did not like any civilians, even official civilians, interfering in police matters. And he did not like his superiors passing such civilians on to him, particularly on a night when he had his hands full. He probably had gastritis and troubles about his allowances as well, thought Mr. Calder. But it didn’t make the situation any easier.
The superintendent explained, as if he grudged every word dispensed, “We’ve got a big job on tonight. Large-scale traffic in hashish. Involves two or three clubs and a lot of boarding-houses. Well – they’re brothels, really.”
“It sounds exciting,” said Mr. Calder. “Which particular clubs and brothels have you got your eye on?”
The superintendent hesitated and then rapped out a list of names, adding, so quickly that there wasn’t even a full stop at the end of the sentence, “I’m afraid I can’t ask you to accompany us.”
“Of course not,” said Mr. Calder.
He continued to sit patiently on his chair. The minute hand of the clock crept down toward the half hour after midnight.
“I fear,” said Mr. Absalom, “that Mr. Behrens has been called away. We should, I think, be leaving.”
“Why slide off now?” said May. “The night’s hardly started.”
Mr. Absalom looked past her at the thickset, black-jowled man standing in the doorway. He came forward, smiling. The girls fell silent.
“I think,” said Mr. Absalom, “that it is agreed we go. Yes?”
“Oh, sure,” said May. “Sure. I’m not objecting.”
She swallowed half a glass of champagne quickly, as though it had been a prop that the stage manager was going to remove. “Come on, Angie. The party’s over.”
“Angela will be coming with us,” said Mr. Absalom.
The blonde girl had one arm linked through Nuri’s. She was smiling nervously. They were all looking at the boy. There was the briefest pause, a tiny hitch, a half-beat in the music, a trip in the heart’s rhythm.
Then Nuri said, with a smile, “Time for bed, eh?”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Absalom. “Time we were all in bed.”
The party moved, as a body, to the door, then out into the foyer. The thickset man said, “Pleasant dreams, your Highness.”
Mr. Absalom gave him a sharp, unfriendly glance. Then they were in the car. One of the chauffeurs was driving. The other held the door and climbed into the car with them, occupying the seat previously occupied by Mr. Behrens.
“Where are we going?” said Nuri.
“Actually,” said Angie, “you’re coming back with me for the night.”
Nuri opened his brown eyes a little wider. Then he said, “That’s very kind of you. We hardly know each other.”
The girl chuckled.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “I can see that. You behave yourself, and we’ll have no trouble. Right?”
“Naturally there will be no trouble,” said Mr. Absalom. “Our first care must be for his Highness’ comfort.”
Mr. Behrens rolled over, grunted and sat up. His fingers scrabbled on the carpet. He opened his eyes fractionally, and closed them again, as an unfriendly hand thrust a white-hot skewer through the top of his head. Keeping his eyes shut, he fumbled in his top waistcoat pocket and brought out a transparent capsule about the size of a cigarette stub. He snapped it between finger and thumb and held this under his nose.
Five deep breaths later he sat up cautiously, and opened his eyes. The pain had retreated into a dull, throbbing doughnut at the top of his head. His neck felt as though it had been broken and inexpertly set. Otherwise he seemed to be functioning normally. He was in a cell-like room, with two round windows set high up in the wall, and two doors. It looked like the sort of place a man might squeeze a secretary into if the secretary wasn’t too fussy about her working conditions. It was furnished with a cheap typing table and one of those curious chairs with spindly chromium legs and no proper back to it.
Mr. Behrens picked it up. It was a better weapon than an ordinary chair. Unfortunately there was no one to hit with it. He put it down again, and tried the doors. Both, as he had expected, were locked.
Mr. Behrens took out his key fold. Hanging among his car keys and door keys were two steel implements. One looked like a toothpick with a spatulate tip, the other like a thinner version of the implement with which boy scouts are supposed to extract stones from horses’ hooves. Mr. Behrens moved the chair across to the inner door and sat down. It took him three patient minutes to locate the spring in the lock, and another minute to lift and slide the gate. Then he opened the door, and found himself, as he had already guessed he might, back in the office in which he had been knocked out. It was now empty.
Mr. Behrens sat down behind the desk and tried the drawers. None of them were locked. In one he found, under some papers, a Walther automatic pistol with a full magazine. He put this in his jacket pocket, walked across to the passage door and opened it.
There was no one in sight, but there seemed to be quite a lot of people about. There was a hum and clatter from the floor below, and he heard a door open and shut. Mr. Behrens was a man who liked to do things in the simplest and least troublesome way. He went back to the office, lifted the receiver from the telephone and started to dial.
At one o’clock Mr. Calder had strolled out into the charge room. Here he found the station sergeant, a friendly soul, who produced a cup of tea and a tin of biscuits which Mr. Calder attacked gratefully, having eaten nothing since lunch time.
“How’s the big clean-up going?” he asked.
“It’s Operation Washout so far,” said the Sergeant. “We get these tip-offs. Sometimes they’re hot. Sometimes just the opposite.”
“Nothing at the clubs?”
“We gave the Krokodil the once-over. Clean as a Baptist chapel. We’re moving in on the Quart Pot and the Tableau next. We’ll do the boarding-houses later. You know what we’ll find there? A lot of business men, down from Manchester and Liverpool. Virile, these Midlands business men.”
The telephone rang. The sergeant picked it up, listened and said, “It’s for you.”
“Take your coat off,” said Angie. “Make yourself comfortable. We got a bit of time to put in before anything happens.”
“What is going to happen?” enquired Nuri.
“Actually we’re waiting here till the police come.”
“The police? That will be embarrassing for you, I imagine.”
“I’m used to ‘em,” said Angie. “Besides, confidentially, I’m prepared to put up with a bit of embarrassment, if the money’s good enough. It’s you who’s supposed to be embarrassed.”
“Suppose I walk out before they come.”
“Well, first, you can’t, because I’ve locked the door and put the key where you wouldn’t find it, and even if you did find it and unlocked the door, there’s someone watching outside, and he’d put you back in again, twice as quick as you went out. So let’s relax. We’ll have a cup of tea, shall we?”
Nuri looked round the bedroom with interest. It was so neat, and so compact, like a cabin on a ship – the long cupboards with shelves above and below, the bed which folded up into the wall, the tiny curtained annex into which Angie had disappeared, and which seemed from the glimpse he had had of it, to be bathroom, kitchen and scullery combined. It was not unlike his own cubicle at school. Frillier, of course.
“You wouldn’t happen,” said Angie, “to have such a thing as a cigarette on you? I’m right out of them.”
“But of course.”
Nuri put his hand in his pocket, and then stood for a moment, unmoving. There was certainly a case there. He ran his fingers over it, then drew it out, holding it up under the light. There had been ten cigarettes left in the case Mr. Absalom had given him. There were ten in this one. He picked one out and sniffed it delicately.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “These are Egyptian.”
“I’m not fussy,’ said Angie, reappearing with a tray on which she had set cups, saucers, a milk jug and a sugar basin. “Light it for me, there’s a dear.”
Mr. Behrens had finished telephoning and, being a man who did not believe in wasting opportunities, was examining the contents of the desk drawers, when he heard footsteps in the passage. The door opened, and Mr. Absalom came in. When he saw Mr. Behrens, he started to retreat. When he saw the gun in Mr. Behrens’ hand he abandoned the effort, and stood very still.
“Come in,” said Mr. Behrens, “and shut the door. Sit down. I’m glad you’ve come along. It’s saved me the trouble of coming to look for you. What have you done with the boy?”