Anne nodded. She guessed that the wounded arm – he had jagged it along a broken bottle when he had fallen, and another broken piece of glass had been responsible for the cut over his left eye – was worse than he made out, otherwise he would not have been prepared to wait for a fortnight.
That’s fine. But – what happens meanwhile?’
‘I wish I knew.’ said the Toff, and he closed his eye. He looked weary and worried, and the nurse frowned when she entered a few seconds afterwards. Anne stood up, but the Toff stopped her with a raised hand.
‘Listen, young lady, this fiancé of yours: where is he?’
‘At Wisford Hotel. I sent for him –’
‘And of course he came running. Has he got a family?’
She looked puzzled.
‘No, he lives in lodgings at the moment. Why?’
‘Just this,’ said Rollison slowly. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Dragoli to try and get his own back, and I don’t want you to get in the front line. What’s his name, by the way?’
‘Frensham – Ted Frensham.’
‘Well, he sounds all right’ admitted the Toff dubiously.’
‘I hope he is, because I’m going to suggest that you stay with some friends of mine. Excellent people, but in Surrey and not in Essex.’
‘I could stay here and help to look after you,’ suggested Anne Farraway.
‘You could not,’ said the Toff. ‘In the first place, I’m an impressionable man, and in the second I don’t want to break your heart, or the heart of Mr. Frensham. Will you go?’
The girl hesitated.
‘Who – who are these people?’
‘Named Tennant. Bob and Patricia. They’re quite respectable; they’ve a nice house and servants to look after them. I know it means giving up your job, but there’s a lot to be said for sliding out of Dragoli’s reach. And if he should happen to find you, I can’t think of a better man than Bob Tennant – barring myself, of course,’ he added, with a smile that seemed a little weary, ‘to take care of you. I’ve asked them to meet you at the Eclat Hotel for lunch, anyhow, so –’
The nurse stirred impatiently. Anne Farraway stood up quickly, pressed the Toff’s left hand, thanked him, and promised she would take no chances. The Toff lay back wearily after she had gone, and he was asleep before he started thinking seriously of what he would do when he was on his feet again.
Chief-Inspector McNab, heavily bandaged, and groaning when he moved in his bed, eyed the Assistant Commissioner glumly.
‘I wish I could get to see Colliss, sir, but –’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Warrender, with a smile. ‘I’ll go down and see him myself, McNab. According to his report he knows something we can bite on, but he says he does not think there is any desperate hurry. This Black Circle thing has not been working too long. We found it in good time.’
‘I’m hoping so,’ said McNab, who would never have scored high marks for optimism.
Warrender laughed more lightly than he felt, and left the ward.
He thought of the Toff as he stepped into a taxi after ordering the driver to take him to Scotland Yard. It was right enough up to a point, but he wished he had been more careful about allowing it to be told ‘officially’ that the Hon. Richard Rollison was dead.
But Rollison on his feet could look after himself, while one thing was certain: while he was in the private nursing-home no one from Dragoli’s Black Circle would discover that he was alive, and he would have a better chance of recovering.
An evening paper on his desk when he reached the office towards nine o’clock – he was up early during the Black Circle schemozzle – still carried headlines about the outrage in Shadwell. There had been a great stir in the Yard, and farther along, in Whitehall. The Home Secretary himself had shown interest and concern, but Warrender had not yet felt justified in raising a real scare.
No one more than Warrender could appreciate the damnable effect of a widespread habit of taking cocaine.
It was practised, of course, among a small circle of erotic wastrels in every big town. Probably three or four thousand people in London were victims. But from the amount of dope that had been seen by McNab and Rollison at the ‘Red Lion’ and destroyed in the fire, there were supplies enough to last London’s normal clientele for years.
It would not be the first time that efforts had been made to make the drug habit more widespread. Its effect was more insidious than anything else, and Warrender, with good reason, considered it the biggest crime. Now it was being practised on a big scale, and he did not want to cause an alarm.
The fact that Garrotty had been employed by Dragoli had helped him.
The official police story was that Garrotty was making an attempt to start gang-warfare in London. That had satisfied the demands of the Press, and to a point it was true. There had been a great commotion on the placards in the newspapers on the morning following the raid, and Scotland Yard had been warmly congratulated on its great effort to wipe out the threat of gangsterdom.
Warrender’s lips twisted.
Without the Toff, the raid would never have taken place. Had he been told, without being shown evidence, he would have doubted the possibility of one man being able to do what Rollison had done. But there it was....
Warrender looked at his watch, and pressed a bell for a sergeant. It was fair-haired Detective-Sergeant Owen, and Warrender smiled a little.
‘Owen, we’re going into the country for a breath of air.’ The Assistant Commissioner was popular with the C.I.D. officials because he was not above joking mildly with them, in direct contrast to the efforts of the other A.C.s. ‘Have a fast car, and be outside at nine-thirty, will you?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Owen, curly haired and cheerful to look at, left the office with satisfaction. A day virtually off duty was a rare thing.
Warrender telephoned to Mr. Reginald Colliss, the well-known archaeologist who was not
as
well known as a special agent of the Yard, and told him that McNab would not be able to get along the following morning, and that he, Warrender, had determined to go along instead.
‘It’s a day earlier,’ he said, ‘but it’s urgent, Colliss.’
‘I’ll be in,’ promised Reginald Colliss.
When he had finished talking to the Assistant Commissioner, Colliss leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. As the photograph that Garrotty had seen had emphasized, he had a very full jaw, and very full lips. Yet oddly enough, when in repose, he looked handsome, perhaps because of his well-shaped nose and the pair of fine grey eyes that gazed at all and sundry with a cool, detached air that hid most of his thoughts.
In many ways Colliss was worried.
He stood up and walked towards the window. The sun was shining; the green lawns looked cool and refreshing. After the heat and sweat of Stamboul, England was a paradise.
He was above medium height, and his shoulders were very thick. Yet his hands and feet were smaller than the average, the hands white and carefully tended. His hair was rather long and crisp, and when he smiled little lines crept into the corners of his eyes.
The wrinkles appeared suddenly, but he was not smiling.
He had seen the movement in the shrubbery at the end of the lawn. It was not the wind, and he did not believe that it was a cat or dog, or even a rabbit. There was something darker there than there should have been.
He drew towards the wall a little, his eyes narrowed.
The dark thing moved. He could just make out the figure of a man slipping through the shrubbery to the side of the lawn. The man was lost from sight, suddenly, in a small thicket.
Colliss pursed his lips as he turned towards his desk.
He opened the top drawer and took out a heavy Army revolver. It was fully loaded, and despite his small hands he carried it lightly and purposefully back to the window.
There was the slightest rustle of sound outside.
Colliss moved quickly to try and catch a glimpse of whoever was near, but he failed. For from the far end of the lawn he saw another figure, a squat, swarthy man, crouching low and pointing something towards the house.
The shot came a split second later.
Colliss jumped to one side. The glass of the window smashed into a thousand pieces, one splinter sticking into the special agent’s coat. Colliss swore as he returned the fire, but several shots were coming, and he knew that he had more than two men to deal with.
And then a gun appeared close to the window. Colliss could not see the man carrying it. Just the gun and the hand that held it showed. He had not time to move out of the line of fire; he raised his own gun.
The two shots echoed simultaneously, and Colliss’s gun clattered from his hand.
Garrotty stood in the french windows of Colliss’s Winchester house. His automatic was smoking in his hand. There was blood on Colliss’s fingers, and the man on the floor looked unconscious. Garrotty moved quickly across the room, while footsteps and cries of alarm came from the other side.
His lips twisted, he flung the door open.
Two women and two men stood in the passage. They had been running and each one stopped at the sight of Garrotty and the gun. Fear beyond all reason showed on their faces, as the gangster, forbidding and menacing, lifted the automatic a little. A red-faced maid screeched.
Garrotty’s thick voice flung a question. Over his mouth and chin he was wearing a handkerchief, over his eyes the brim of a wide-brimmed hat was pulled well down.
‘How many more in de house; – you?’
He stabbed his gun towards the first man, plump, middle-aged, and dressed in black – Colliss’s butler for twenty-five years. The man gasped the words out: ‘None, we’re all here, we –’
‘Turn around,’ snapped Garrotty.
The butler was the only one to hesitate, and Garrotty loosed a shot towards the man’s feet. It worked, and the butler swung round. Another swarthy-faced man joined Garrotty, masked as he was, and Garrotty nodded. The second gangster used a black-jack with equal force on men and women. Four bodies dropped, quite unconscious, to the floor of the passage.
‘Find a room wit’ a small window and push dem in,’ snapped Garrotty. ‘Move fast, Red, we ain’t losin’ no time.’
The man named Red said nothing, but hurried along the passage, while Garrotty turned back to the room where Colliss was lying. A third gangster was standing by the window, watching the grounds, although there was little chance of an interruption.
Colliss’s house was built well away from the main road. The archaeologist had always had a passion for the country, and he had buried himself on this little five acre patch of grass and woodland, with a ten-roomed house that was amply large enough for his bachelor requirements. The nearest building, according to Dragoli’s report when he had given the gangster particulars of the place, was a mile and a half away. Anyone who might have heard the shooting at a mile and a half would have taken it for granted that it came from an ordinary morning shoot for birds or rabbits
‘Fassen his legs,’ Garrotty snapped.
The third gangster obeyed, using thin tough cord, while Garrotty started to go through the contents of the study. Bureaux drawers and cupboards were smashed open and the papers taken out. In five minutes Garrotty had every available paper on the desk by a wall, and at the same moment Colliss stirred, groaning a little. Garrotty swung towards him, and fear showed in the special agent’s eyes as the gun moved close to his head.
‘Talk fast,’ snarled Garrotty; he had learned almost from childhood how to strike fear in others and it came as a habit. ‘Where’s de dope on de Black Circle racket, Colliss?’
Colliss hesitated. Garrotty bent down and struck him brutally across the face. Colliss writhed in his bonds, and the gangster hit him again. Colliss sobbed: ‘In – in the safe! In – my – bedroom.’
‘De keys?’
‘In – my pocket,’ Colliss gasped.
Garrotty bent down, tapped the man’s body over expertly, found the keys and took them out. In five minutes he had located Colliss’s bedroom, opened the safe and obtained the papers. They meant nothing to him, but they would be what Dragoli wanted. Garrotty believed that he knew when a man had talked all he could, and as he entered the room he snapped orders to his fellows; the gangster who had hit the servants had returned, after locking them in a pantry at the back of the house.
‘O.K.,’ grunted Garrotty, ‘we’re through. Get de car started, Red.’
Red, a fringe of red hair showing at the back of his head, beneath his hat, stepped out on to the lawn. The second man followed him. Garrotty turned round, his lips twisted.
Colliss’s eyes still showed fear, and Garrotty laughed harshly,
‘You oughta learned how to take it, fella. So long.’
He lifted his gun a couple of inches, and touched the trigger. Four shots rang out in quick succession, hitting Colliss about the region of the heart. Colliss leapt upwards convulsively and then crashed down.
Garrotty rubbed his fingers across his nose and stepped after the others. Three minutes later the noise of a car engine starting in the by-lane at the back of Colliss’s house broke the silence of the countryside.
The house in Camberley where Achmed Dragoli was staying was like Colliss’s place in many ways, although it was closer to the town, and the main road. It had ten acres of its own grounds, and it had been let furnished to a man who called himself Smithers a month before. Dragoli had several furnished houses about the country; he knew that there was the possibility of needing several hide-outs in case of trouble, and he was well prepared.
Garrotty was grinning complacently.
‘I put him over, Brodder, and I reckon you’ll be interested in dese.’ He dumped a case containing the papers from Colliss on a table. The room on the second floor of the house was in much better order now, for Dragoli had obtained servants, all male, who could use a gun and cook a seven-course dinner with equal facility.
‘De lot in de envelope,’ said Garrotty, with pride, ‘come from de safe, Boss, an’ Colliss reckoned dey was all ‘bout de Black Circle.’
Dragoli nodded, without speaking, and took the papers out. There were a dozen, many of them no more than brief pencil sketches with a few notes scribbled on in ink. His expression did not alter as he looked through one thing after the other. Then: ‘Where are the rest?’