Unlike most South London streets, where houses seem to have been poured into a mould and turned out to cool, the houses in Pipe Street had been designed with flair. One had turrets, another had battlements, a third had a chimney shaped like the funnel of a ship. Number seven had a front garden the size of a billiard table, which was so crammed with models that the front path had some difficulty in finding its way between them. There were dwarfs, gnomes, windmills, castles, lighthouses, and helter-skelters; in a place of honour, a full-scale representation of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
David picked his way up to the door and rang the bell. The door was opened by an elderly man with a brown face and white hair. Leonard Mullion had started life in the Docks Police, had retired early and was now the park keeper in charge of the smallest of the three Rotherhithe parks. He seemed to be expecting David and waved him into the front room. On the table was a peacock, cast in iron. Mr Mullion was decorating its tail, using a dozen little pots of paint of the type used for touching up the bodywork of motorcars.
He said, “I got the room ready when I heard you might be coming in. At the back, nice and quiet.”
“That’s just the ticket, Len. I don’t quite know when I’ll be needing it, but I guess it might be any day now. So what I’m going to do is pay you four weeks in advance and collect a key. When I do come, I might come in a bit of a hurry.”
“Suit yourself,” said Mr Mullion. “But if you turn up after dark, mind where you put your feet. The last man who had that room—he was a crane driver—he came home pissed one night and trod on the Mad Hatter.”
“I’m a sober citizen,” said David. “I can only remember being drunk once in my whole life.”
“That’s half the trouble. People
don’t
remember it.”
“I was fourteen at the time. My da took me on a choir outing, and I was sick over the leading tenor’s boots. That’s not a thing you forget in a hurry, I can tell you.”
When he got back to the hotel he went in again by the back door. The watcher was still standing about in the street in front. “He’ll get picked up for loitering if he doesn’t watch it,” said David. He did a good deal of talking to himself when there was no one else to talk to.
“He did what?” said the head of Gowers Enquiry Agency.
“Stayed in his room all day. Never came out once.”
“How do you know he didn’t come out the back way?”
“Not being able to be in two places at once,” said the young man aggressively, “how would I know if he came out the back way or not?”
His feet were hurting him.
“Something in that,” agreed Mr Gowers. It had been presented to him as a routine job, of no particular urgency. All the same, Randall Blackett was a man who preferred results to excuses.
“If he really stays in his room all day,” he said, “he must do most of his business on the telephone.”
“There’s no telephone in his room. He’d have to use one in the cabinet in the front hall.”
“All right. We’ll see if we can lean on the nig who runs the place to get us a tap on it. There’ll be an extension in his office.”
“Then I’d better spend the day sitting in his office,” said the young man hopefully.
“No point in that. Tomorrow’s Thursday. He’ll be off on one of his Continental coach trips. We’ll get it set up for when he comes back.”
The routine was by now so well established that David began to feel that he had been doing it all his life. He even recognised two members of his first contingent, a silent married couple called Longmore, who had come back for a second helping.
On this occasion, their progress was even more leisurely. A night at Amboise, two days’ sight-seeing round the castles of the Loire, a night south of Poitiers and a third stop near Grasse. As August turned to September, the weather became wet and cold, but when David suggested that they ought to lose no time getting south of the Alps, Collings disagreed.
It was plain that he was working to a carefully timed programme
It was not until the evening of the seventh day that they reached Florence. They were booked into a large, modern hotel overlooking the Filippo Strozzi Park. The bedrooms had in-house television sets, drink cabinets (“Rings a bell downstairs every time you open it,” said Collings sourly) and a secure-looking built-in wall cupboard. It did not look the sort of thing which could be opened by any old key. Collings observed it with pleasure. He took charge of the black bag, locked it in and pocketed the key.
“I guess you’ll be glad to forget about it for a bit,” he said.
David agreed. He was finding that he could read Collings like a barometer. On the first two days in Florence the pressure was low and the weather was set fair. On the afternoon of the third day the needle began to creep up. He was not a bit surprised when, that evening, Collings suggested a night out together.
David affected to think about it. He said, “All right. As long as you behave yourself this time.”
Considered as a social event, it was not a wild success. Collings had clearly got orders to keep them both away from the hotel until after midnight. On two occasions, when David yawned and suggested that they might go home, Collings called for more drinks.
“If this was his technique with my predecessors,” thought David, “no wonder they smelled a rat. Perhaps he simply explained the whole plot to them and cut them in for a share of the loot. Watterson might have agreed. Maybe Moule, too. Come to think of it, that was probably what started him on the downward path.”
By the time they finally got back to the hotel, it was one o’clock, and Collings, in spite of his surprising capacity for absorbing alcohol, was as nearly drunk as David had seen him.
He sat down on the end of his bed and started to take his shoes off. David said, “What about a nightcap?”
“If you touch that bloody drink cabinet, you’ll have to pay for every bloody bottle in it.”
“I wasn’t going to touch it,” said David.
He opened his own travelling bag and extracted a half-empty bottle of Highland Malt whisky. Collings eyed it with approval.
“That’s better,” he said. “We’ve had enough of that Italian muck. A glass of the old and bold. Just what the doctor ordered.” He took off his coat, removed his collar and tie, loosened his belt and belched.
David fetched two glasses from the bathroom annexe, poured a generous portion into one of them and gave it to Collings, and a rather more modest one into the other.
He said, “Water with it?”
“Never insult a good whisky with water,” said Collings. He took a gulp and smacked his lips. “There are times,” he said, “when I think you’re a Welsh bastard. There are other times when I love you.”
David grinned. He said, “I hope that’s not a proposal of marriage,” and went out to put some water into his own drink. He was a minute or two doing this. When he came back Collings’s empty glass was on the floor, and Collings was flat on his back on the bed. His face was bright red and his mouth was wide open.
David looked at him anxiously. He was making a noise like a man who was fighting for breath and trying to snore at the same time.
“I hope I haven’t overdone it,” said David.
He slipped the braces off Collings’s shoulders and pulled off his trousers. Collings in underpants, shirt and socks was not an attractive sight. David covered him with a blanket and put a pillow under his head. He then extracted the keys he wanted from Collings’s trouser pocket, opened the cupboard, took out the black bag and set to work.
By the time he had finished, Collings had rolled on to one side, and his face was a more normal colour. Three o’clock was striking as David undressed, turned out the light and climbed into bed. Even Collings’s snores failed to keep him awake.
“Christ almighty!” said Collings. “What the hell did we drink?”
“A bottle of lousy grappa, half a bottle of lousier ouzo, and a glass each of my good malt whisky.”
“It can’t have been the whisky.”
“You’re dead right it wasn’t the whisky. I’ve been drinking it for years. It was the mixture.”
“I’ve got a head like a bloody dynamo.” Collings peered at him with bloodshot eyes which bulged from a face with a yellowish tinge. “You’re looking too bloody cheerful.”
“I have a very peculiar constitution,” said David. “My microcosm synthesises with alcohol. I’ll have to be getting along now. I promised to conduct a party of our clients round the Uffizi.”
Collings said, “Ugh,” and then, “I’m going back to bed.”
That was their last full day in Florence. David noted with interest the care which Collings now exercised over the safety of the black bag. When they finally departed, he took it out of the cupboard and carried it down himself to the coach and placed it beside the driver’s seat, where it would be under his eye. At Calais and again at Dover, when David had to open the bag to get out the tickets and the passports, he could feel Collings breathing down his neck. He almost said something about it, but refrained. The charade was now so open, and he was so much a part of it, that any comment would have been superfluous.
Their crossing had been a later one than usual, and it was dusk when they reached London and dark by the time they pulled up outside the Rayhome office. Collings carried the bag upstairs. The reception desk was empty, but David could see a line of light under the door of the Chevertons’ room and could hear the rumble of voices.
As Collings carried the bag in, David caught a glimpse of both the Chevertons and a third man, someone he had not seen before. He got an impression of a belted raincoat and a broad pair of shoulders before the door shut. He walked slowly along the passage and sat himself down in the small waiting room at the end.
Time passed. David looked at his watch. More than thirty minutes. He got up and moved across to the door. He had heard no sound, but it seemed to be locked.
David examined the window. It was unbarred and opened easily, but it gave on to a sheer drop of nearly twenty feet into a small, enclosed courtyard.
“If this was a bedroom,” he said, “I could knot three sheets together and be off. Even a pair of curtains might do the trick. But no curtains.”
He was regretting the lack of soft furnishings when the door opened and Bob Cheverton came in. He was smiling. He said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, David. We had a couple of telephone calls to attend to. Another successful trip, I gather.”
“Did you have to lock me in?”
“Lock you in? We didn’t lock you in. Why should we? There isn’t a lock on the door. It jams sometimes.”
“My mistake,” said David. “I suffer terribly from claustrophobia. It started when my mother locked me in the airing cupboard at the age of six and forgot about me. I was there seventeen hours.”
Cheverton was still smiling. He said, “One thing all our clients tell me about you is that you have a wonderful imagination. Here’s your bonus. Same as last time. Now you’re getting into your stride, we should be able to make it a regular one.” He handed David an envelope. “No need to bother the tax man about it, eh?”
“One of the prime objects in my life is to save the tax man bother,” agreed David. They were out in the passage by now. A quick backward glance showed him that there was a bolt right at the top of the door.
As he passed the Chevertons’ room he could see Ronald Cheverton sitting at his desk. Belted raincoat had gone. David shouted out, “Good night.” Ronald raised his head for a moment and looked at him with dead, dispassionate eyes.
David went out into the street.
He was thinking hard.
It was possible that the door had, in fact, been jammed and not bolted; but he did not believe it. It was possible that the Chevertons and the stranger had examined the bag and not detected the substitution he had made. He did not believe this either. In which case, the needle had swung round to Storm Warning. Force Twelve on the Beaufort Scale.
It was neatly done.
A girl was coming towards him along the pavement. She seemed to be drunk and was tacking gently from side to side, talking to herself. As she reached David she veered towards the roadway. David naturally veered inwards. The man stationed in the doorway at that point hit him, once, with a silk stocking full of wet sand.
“Nothing,” said the man in the belted raincoat. His name was McVee, and his nickname, used only by privileged friends, was Monkey. He had a nose shaped like a little boot, which had been squashed down, in some fight or accident, on to his upper lip. This may have accounted for the nickname.
“You’re sure?” said Bob Cheverton. He was trying to keep his voice level and not succeeding very well.
“Sure? Of course I’m sure. If he’d had half an ounce of tobacco on him we’d have found it.”
“So what’s he done with it?”
Collings said, with a truculence which failed to conceal his own nervousness, “One thing’s bloody certain. He didn’t get bloody nothing out of that bag from the time we left Calais. I’m not saying he mightn’t have picked a lock and got it out one night on the trip. Like I’ve told you before, I can’t stay awake all night. It’s not reasonable. But
if
he got the stuff out of the bag, it’s still in Italy. That’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?” said Bob.
“If
he got it out. Who else could have got it out? Apart from you.”
Collings said, “I’m not taking that from you or anyone,” and lumbered to his feet.
There was a fifth man in the room, a plump character, without much hair on his head. His tanned face, neat dark suit, silk shirt and discreet gold cuff links suggested a businessman who spent his holidays in the Bahamas or the South of France. His voice, when he spoke, matched his appearance. There was authority in it. He said, “Don’t be stupid, Collings. Just relax. No one’s accused you of anything, yet.”
“He said—”
“It doesn’t matter what he
said.
All he was doing was examining certain possibilities. For myself, I can see two and two only. Either Morgan filched the stuff one night, in the way you’ve suggested, or it was never there at all.”
The four men considered the second possibility.