But not quite himself, thought Susan. Someone who’s been badly frightened never quite gets over it. There’s a lesion, deep down. Like a scar which gives you a twinge in the cold weather.
“I would like to find out what happened. I really would.”
Susan said, “If I were you, I’d leave it alone. I mean that.”
“If you think that would be best.”
She seemed relieved that someone else had made the decision. They walked back to the office together. The first thing Susan noticed was the dark blue S-class Mercedes 450 which was sneering at the other cars in the car park. The next was the large, light-haired boy in the driving seat who caught her eye and winked at her.
Susan went inside thoughtfully and sat down behind her desk. She could hear the voices from the private office. Presently the door opened, and Blackett came out, followed by Brandreth. She thought that Blackett was going to ignore her, but he swung round at the last moment, came back and stood in front of her desk, balancing forward on both feet like a swimmer on the edge of the high board.
He said, “Mr Brandreth will have told you that we’re in for a race.”
“Golden Apple versus Peppo.”
“Right. And it’s going to be a closer thing than I thought. Merry’s have cut another three days out of their printing schedule. What would you suggest we do about that?”
He seemed to be asking her opinion seriously, so she thought about it. She said. “There’s not much slack in our new schedule. If the bus and Underground posters are the important thing, we could get them out first and fast. It would mean all-night working, but it could be done.”
“There’s an alternative. We might buy up Merry and Merry.”
“Suppose they aren’t for sale?”
“Most things are for sale if you offer the right price. I’m going to see my accountants about it now. Talking of which, I understand we have something in common.”
“Oh?”
“I qualified as an accountant in 1950. When did you take your finals?”
Susan nearly said, “How did you know that?” but realised it would be stupid and said, “Three years ago.”
“But never practised?”
“I thought I’d have a shot at a business career first.”
“Very sensible. I thought I’d have a shot at it, too. I’ve been shooting ever since.”
Brandreth was fidgeting, but Blackett showed no signs of wanting to depart. He said, “Accountancy training is like legal training. Once you’ve been through it, it conditions your thinking. I knew you were an accountant as soon as I read that report you did for young Harmond. It stood out a mile.”
He swung round and stalked out. Brandreth trotted after him. When they reached the car park, the chauffeur already had the door open. Blackett waved to Brandreth to get in beside him.
He said, “If you employ that girl as a shorthand typist you’ll be wasting her. She’s got an organisational brain.”
“I’d realised that. I think she’ll be very useful.”
“You can keep her as long as you use her properly. No longer.”
“It’s a mystery to me why she’s in the job at all. She must be around thirty. With a brain like hers and her looks, I’d have thought she’d have been married long ago.”
“Any sign of a boyfriend?”
“She did mention once—I can’t remember quite how it came up—that she had a Welsh ex-boyfriend.”
“You’re sure she said “ex?”
“Yes. And said it pretty firmly.”
“That’s the snag about having all the talents. You have to find someone to match up to you. It isn’t always possible.”
This seemed to be the end of the conversation. Brandreth got out, and the car drove off.
“I told you at the time he was no good,” said Miss Crawley triumphantly. “I saw him coming out of this public house with a common girl on his arm. He was drunk. He was always drunk.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Gerald Hopkirk. He was tired of Miss Crawley and wanted to get on with his work.
“It passes my comprehension why Mr Lyon gave him a reference, as well as all that money.”
“How did you know what he gave him?”
“I knew because Mr Morgan told me. With a nasty smirk. I said, if I’d been Mr Lyon—if I’d found you nosing round among my private papers—I’d have booted you straight out. What would our clients have said if they’d known that he was snooping into their private affairs? What would Mr Blackett have said if he’d known you’d caught him looking into his files?”
“What indeed?” said Blackett.
The Sergeant had opened the door for him, and he was halfway into the room. Miss Crawley gave a squeak of agitation, and Gerald jumped to his feet.
“I understand that Lyon is still not back from his lunch.” Blackett looked pointedly at his wristwatch as he said this. “Perhaps I could explain to you a simple matter that I wanted looked into, and you could pass it on to him. The matter is urgent, or I wouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Of course,” said Gerald, Miss Crawley fluttered out, followed by the Sergeant. “I’m sure Mr Lyon won’t be long. But please sit down.”
“And who was the unsatisfactory character you had to get rid of?”
“A chap called Morgan. He wasn’t a bad sort, really. But he didn’t quite fit into an accountant’s office.”
“I think I remember seeing him. A Welshman, medium height, thick-set.”
“That’s him.”
“And which of my files was he interested in?”
Gerald remembered, with a feeling of relief, that it had been an innocuous collection of PAYE returns. He said, “I think it was a genuine mistake. He was looking for another file and happened to notice his own initials on this one.” Gerald picked the file out of the open drawer beside him and put it on the desk. “You see. D.R.M. It wasn’t really his initials, of course. They belonged to another chap who used to work here. Dennis Moule.”
“I remember him well,” said Blackett. “He was Julius Mantegna’s number-one boy. What happened to him?”
“I’m afraid he went downhill a bit.”
“And Morgan’s going downhill after him? This office must have a demoralising effect on its assistants. Hullo! You’ve still got that.”
It was the newspaper cutting, stapled on to the inside cover of the file. Blackett read it through carefully, his face quite expressionless. Gerald had never been entirely at ease with Blackett. He gave off the disturbing radiation of power and money, but there was more to it than that. He had known other rich and powerful men and had been quite easy in their company. He was relieved when Sam Lyon came bustling in. Blackett said, “I gather you’ve been having a good lunch.”
“A boring lunch, followed by an equally boring meeting,” said Lyon. “Shall we go along to my room?”
Blackett took a last look at the file on the desk, as though he was committing something to memory, and then said, “Let’s do that.”
It was nearly an hour later when Blackett left the office. He said to the chauffeur, who was holding the door open, “I want you to do something for me, Harald. Find our friend, Mr Trombo. He should be in his shop at this hour. Tell him I’ll expect a call at five o’clock exactly. A public box, the usual procedure. You can take the car. I’ll go on by taxi.”
When Harald had driven off, Blackett stood for a moment, unmoving. Miss Crawley, from her upper window, thought, “What a terrible man. Doesn’t he look splendid. An emperor.” She followed him with her eyes as he moved off down the street.
At the nearest telephone kiosk, Blackett dialled a number and spoke briefly. He said, “David Rhys Morgan. He used to work for my accountants, Martindale, Mantegna and Lyon. When they sacked him he got a job with Rayhome Tours. I want you to find out all about him. No action, just information. Where he lives. Girlfriends, present and past. Other connections. Right?”
“Right,” said the voice at the other end.
The next French trip went off so quietly, and Collings was so relaxed, that it confirmed David’s guess. The heroin traffic was confined to Italy. This was logical. He knew that base opium was manufactured in Turkey and Afghanistan and was converted in small factories in Greece and Albania, first into morphine hydrochloride and then into the infinitely more valuable diacetyl morphine, popularly known as heroin. It would cross the Adriatic in fishing boats and be sold to distributing agents in Italy. This part of the organisation was a Mafia monopoly. The end market was Great Britain, where the sale of heroin was doubling every year.
“And here am I,” said David, “a humble link in this profitable chain, and wondering whether I can keep a wee piece of the profit for myself. Does not the Bible tell us that it is lawful to spoil the Egyptians? Yes, indeed.”
He was under no illusions about the risk he was running, and he made his preparations with corresponding care. He was staying at the time in a small hotel in a street on the Pimlico side of Victoria Station. Half the people there were more or less permanent residents; the other half were one-night stop-overs, travelling to or from the Continent. The proprietor was a genial Barbadian with one leg.
David’s first job on the Tuesday morning following the French trip was to get rid of the man in jeans and a mock-leather windcheater who seemed to be interested in his movements. He accomplished this by waiting in Theobald’s Road until there was only one taxi in sight, hailing it and driving off.
He dismissed the taxi at Bond Street Underground Station, took a bus to Piccadilly and walked down St. James’s Street. At the chemist’s shop halfway down on the left he presented the formula which he had scribbled on the back of an envelope. The assistant said, “Going in for home photography, sir?”
“Indeed, yes,” said David. “An old-fashioned camera and an old-fashioned darkroom. None of your instant snapshots.”
At a second chemist’s shop in Pall Mall he bought a large box of antihistamine tablets (“a sovereign remedy for all catarrhal afflictions”).
“You want to be a bit careful with those jiggers,” said the young man who sold them to him. “Lay off alcohol when you take them, and lay off driving too, if you can. They make you very sleepy.”
“Fortunately,” said David, “I am a rigid teetotaller and I possess no car.”
At the next shop, which dealt in fishing accessories, he bought half a dozen plastic bags of the type used for live bait. A tube of clear adhesive from a stationer’s in Lower Regent Street completed his shopping, all of which went into his capacious briefcase. This, in turn, was deposited in the Left Luggage Office at Leicester Square Underground Station. After which he had a drink, a sandwich and several more drinks at the Chandos and spent the afternoon in a cinema which advertised French Fantasy Films—the “Ultimate in Erotic Titillation.” He fell asleep halfway through the first film and woke up at six o’clock, stared blearily at the screen, then at his watch, and remembered that he had a date with Paula and was already late for it.
Paula had to be placated with drink and food. Towards the end of the meal, in one of the smaller Soho restaurants, he said, “You remember Moule?”
“Dennis Moule. Yes. He got the push soon after I came.”
“Do you know why?”
“Well, he was getting ever so queer. People said it was drugs.”
“Poor Moule. He had a brilliant mind.”
“Did you know him?”
“We were at school together.”
“He wasn’t Welsh.”
“I didn’t go to school in Wales. My father wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘Before we know where we are, they’ll be teaching you to speak Welsh.’ So I was packed off to an English public school. That was where I met Dennis. He was my first and best friend. We spent hours in the school workshop turning pieces of metal.”
“Whatever for?”
“We made them just the right size and weight to fit a slot machine in the town that sold packets of cigarettes. We used to smoke them in a lonely barn. We had to stop when the farmer turned up unexpectedly and Dennis dropped his lighted cigarette into the straw. What a bonfire that was!”
“And you were both expelled?”
“Nothing of the sort. We slipped out at the back without being caught. Even at that age I had a talent for avoiding trouble. Since then I’ve developed it into a fine art.”
“You’re a terrible liar. I don’t believe you knew Dennis at all.”
“Certainly I did. And when I met him the other day, we recognised each other immediately.”
“You met Dennis? I thought he’d be dead by now.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He was on drugs. People on drugs don’t last long.”
“You surprise me. He looked quite fit, I thought. A bit thin. Maybe he’d taken a cure.”
“He didn’t seem to me the sort of man who’d have the guts to do that,” said Paula. “But you never can tell. What’s he doing these days?”
“He’s got a job selling encyclopedias. And he asked me to do something for him. He said that letters or parcels might be coming to the Rayhome office addressed to him. I didn’t absolutely follow it. Something about not having been able to give his own address to some people. I said, if anything did turn up I was sure you’d forward it. Send it care of Poste Restante, Burnt Oak.”
“Poste Restante, Burnt Oak,” said Paula agreeably. “Okay. There doesn’t seem to be a lot left in that bottle.”
“The deficiency shall be remedied at once.”
On Wednesday morning, David saw the same young man propping up a lamp post outside the hotel. He looked dispirited. David put him down as a junior and not very experienced employee from a private enquiry agency and wondered who was interesting themselves in his movements. The most likely solution was that his Rayhome bosses were checking up on how he spent the intervals between trips. It would have been a sensible precaution.
David used the back door of the hotel. It seemed to be unguarded, but he was taking no chances. There was a large supermarket in Wilton Road. He went in at the front, through and out at the back, boarded the first bus that came along, left it at a traffic light and nipped quickly down a side road. No one else got off the bus and no one followed him.
He walked to the nearest Underground station, took the Central Line to Bethnal Green, changed on to the East London Section and got out at Surrey Docks Station.
It was a beautiful morning, and even the desolate little streets and weed-grown wasteland seemed to be warmed and cheered by the genial sun. David had an out-of-date street map, but by asking his way of a number of children, who answered him in the almost unintelligible dockland twang, he eventually located Pipe Street.