It was a routine which did not leave much time for gossip, but sometimes, in the early evening when he was waiting for his letters to sign, Andrew Holmes found time to talk. She discovered from him that he was a keen fisherman and, from other people, that he was a formidable poker player—two appropriate pursuits, it seemed to her, for the head of an advertising agency.
Inevitably, sooner or later, the talk turned to Blackett. “In his own way,” said Holmes, “he’s one of the most remarkable men in England. He’s taken on the system, on its own terms, and he’s beaten it. The Inland Revenue would give its collective back teeth to catch him out. They’ve had two shots at him, one with the General Commissioners and another with the Special Commissioners, and they lost them both. He’s too big for them.”
“Too powerful, you mean.”
“No. Too big. He understands every ramification of his own business machine. The people who try to investigate it only manage to see and understand about a fifth of it. They’re like children trying to chase a grown-up through a maze which he built himself. He understands all the twists and turns and blind alleys and comes out of the exit, laughing, while they find themselves exhausted and back at the entrance.”
“They’re very patient,” said Susan. “The tax people, I mean. They don’t give up easily.”
“Certainly. They keep after him because they hate him and envy him. A senior tax inspector—perhaps he’s a man at the top of that particular tree, living in his suburban semi-detached, driving a five-year-old car and worrying about the way the electricity bills keep going up—finds himself dealing with a man like Blackett, who has a house in ten acres of ground near Virginia Water, a full staff of servants, including a gardener and a chauffeur—”
“I’ve seen him,” said Susan. “A big, blond brute.”
“A heated swimming pool, a private squash court and a cellar full of vintage burgundy and claret. What’s his reaction?”
“Perhaps his reaction ought to be that Blackett works harder than he does?”
“Don’t you believe it! His reaction is that he’d like to catch the bastard out and extract a walloping fine from him or send him down for a couple of years.”
“The Inland Revenue can be ruthless, too,” said Susan. “Don’t forget they got A1 Capone after the F.B.I had given up!”
On another occasion it was Susan who introduced the topic. They had been having a difficult time with a client who didn’t seem to know quite what he wanted except that it was a lot of advertising for a little money.
“You have to make allowances, I suppose,” said Susan.
“Why?”
“He had a beastly time during the war. He told me all about it. Four years in a Japanese prison camp. It must have affected him. Mentally as well as physically.”
“Blackett took damned good care that it didn’t affect him. Do you know what he did with his gratuity? People who’d been in Jap hands got treated quite well. I think he collected eight hundred pounds in back pay and such like. Quite a substantial sum in those days. He spent the lot on a three-months’ course in a Norwegian health clinic. The sort of place that started with sauna baths and relaxation classes and finished with P.T. and ski-trekking. That was to take care of the physical side. When he got back to England he put in for a government grant and qualified as an accountant in record time. It was immediately after the war, and service people were allowed to cut corners. As soon as he was qualified he took himself off to America. In contravention, incidentally, of the terms he’d got his grant on. He wasn’t looking for money just then. He was looking for know-how. He got a job with a firm of international insurance brokers—if you know what they do.”
“More or less,” said Susan cautiously. “They find re-insurance for UK risks in the States and vice versa, don’t they? What did he do when he came back?”
“He got a job with Morphews Van Nelle, the Merchant Bankers. Am I boring you?”
“Success stories are never boring.”
“Up to that point, what I’ve been telling you is public property. The
Chronicle
did a profile of him last year. ‘Captains of Industry.’ A clever piece. It made him sound like a mixture between Horatio Bottomley and Father Christmas. I don’t think Blackett liked it much, but the facts about his early life were there, all right. It’s after he left Morphews and founded his own company, Argon, that the record gets a bit elusive. There was one other director, a retired army man, Colonel Paterson. A nice-enough chap who liked to take two hours over his lunch and left all the real work to Blackett. Argon was just a medium-sized run-of-the-mill finance company until it had the good luck to pick up the shares in a property company called Blackbird.”
“It wasn’t luck,” said Susan. “It was Harry Woolf getting cancer.”
“Now how on earth would you know that?”
“I was told about it by Mrs Woolf. She’s a friend of my grandmother.”
She explained about her grandmother.
“Then you know more about that bit than I do,” said Holmes. ‘The buzz round the City was that he’d borrowed the money to buy Woolf’s shares, on pretty steep terms, from a character called Arnie Wiseman. I always thought he had a bit of luck there.”
“Lucky being able to borrow the money, you mean?”
“That was lucky. But it wasn’t what I meant. The point is that Wiseman would certainly have insisted on early repayment of his loan. And the only way Blackett could get the money was by selling off a lot of the actual Blackbird properties and hanging on to the options. Which is certainly what he did in the summer and autumn of 1972. Then, in December 1972, the property bubble burst. I expect you remember it. A lot of investment companies and private banks went under. Argon was laughing. It was practically a cash company by that time. Blackett got a lot of credit for having seen the slump coming. And that sort of credit is mighty useful to a man in his position.
And as I said, I think in that case it was nine parts luck.”
“That’s a useful commodity, too,” said Susan. What happened to Arnie?”
“No one knows. He must have been sitting pretty. He’d got his money back and he’d have got all the collateral benefits he’d bargained for, too. He was a director of Argon, with a good service contract, I’d guess, and a fat expense allowance. Practically he could milk the company of anything he wanted. And then he disappeared.”
“Post hoc,
but not
propter hoc,”
said Susan smugly.
“So! A Latinist
and
an economist.”
“Not really. It was a tag I picked up the other day. I was longing to work it off on someone.”
“Blackett was right. You’re an unusual girl.”
“Did he say so?”
“He’s certainly interested in you. No doubt about that. Why do you think you’ve come up three ladders in record time? You’re being groomed for stardom.”
“What sort of stardom?” said Susan doubtfully.
“Sooner or later—and my guess would be sooner—you’ll find yourself working directly for Blackett.”
“I’m not sure that I should like that.”
“Most people would jump at it. And when I say that he’s interested in you, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that he’s attracted by your appearance, although that’s quite attractive enough for any normal person. Blackett’s not a normal person. Sexually I should guess he’s a virgin. What I meant was, quite literally, that he finds you interesting. And when Blackett finds someone interesting, he likes to take them to pieces to discover what makes them tick.”
Blumfield Terrace, S.E., had some pretensions to gentility. The houses were old and mostly subdivided, but front steps were holystoned, windows were curtained and there were flowers in the tiny gardens. Number 17, which carried the plate of Dr. Ramchunderabbas, M.B., M.I.P.D., was at the far end, where the road, which had been cut off by the railway, ended in a brick wall. At this point, if you were on foot, a passageway took you down, under the railway bridge and out into Blumfield Road, parallel to Blumfield Terrace and to the south of it.
At the open end of the Terrace there was a small, steamy cafe. Most of the work in it was done by a homesick Welsh girl of sixteen, who had no objection to David spending long hours over a single cup of tea, at a table in the window. What she made of him, apart from the fact that he was a fellow exile from the valleys, it is difficult to imagine. His clothes suggested the final step down before destitution. A flannel shirt, without a collar, a grubby windcheater, blue list trousers and gym shoes. Clearly he had no job, or he would not have been sitting about all day.
It took David three patient days to establish the doctor’s routine. There were two normal surgeries, one between ten and twelve in the morning and the other between five and six in the evening. But he gained the impression that there was a third and rather different surgery, which started after the last regular patient had left.
It was difficult to be certain, but he guessed that these visitors must be coming up the passage and getting into the house without showing themselves in the Terrace. The surgery, he now knew, was the room on the first floor. He caught occasional glimpses, through the window, of Dr. Ramchunderabbas, a burly figure in a white coat, and of other men as well. Men he had not seen approaching the house.
He realised that he was going to need a closer observation post, and this presented difficulties. Many of the houses in the Terrace were occupied by elderly ladies, who spent most of their time at their front windows, spying on their neighbours.
Accordingly, when he left the cafe that evening, he made a detour, down the High Street, along Blumfield Road and up the passage from its bottom end. Just short of the top he stopped. His guess had been right. There was a doorway in the wall on the left of the passage which must lead to the back of the doctor’s house. The wall on the other side was high, but not too high for an active man. He jumped for the top and pulled himself up until his chin was level with the coping. What he could see beyond the wall was a derelict triangle of land, knee-deep in nettles and separated by a high wire fence from the railway line.
He thought it would serve.
On the following night he was back at the same spot at ten o’clock, carrying a small knapsack over one shoulder. A quick pull-up, and he was over the wall and down among the nettles. As he arrived a train rattled past on the line. He noted that the wire fence was close-meshed enough to mask him from casual inspection from the train. The nettles were the only drawback.
From his knapsack he took a hammer and three short lengths of angle iron, flat at one end and cut to points at the other. Using the hammer cautiously, he drove these pegs into the brickwork of the wall. The first one went in three feet up, as a step; the other two a couple of feet higher, as a platform. When he had hoisted himself up on to them he found that he could see the length of the passageway as far down as the railway bridge and, immediately opposite him, the door into the doctor’s garden.
On four occasions in the next hour footsteps approached up the passage, and David got into observation. The first time it was a policeman, who walked solidly past, his helmet inches from David’s nose. The next three were all patients of Dr. Ramchunderabbas. They drifted up the passage, phantom figures, making little noise and hugging the shadows, paused at the garden door, darted a quick glance to right and left, then pushed the door open and went through, closing it softly behind them. It was too dark to see faces, but David could hear that one of them was crying softly.
The last of the visitors arrived at half past ten. When he left, the light in the first-floor window went out, and a minute later the light in the ground-floor front room came on. David clambered down stiffly from his perch. He had discovered what he wanted to know. He left the pegs in position, hoisted himself back over the wall and made for his bed.
Sleep proved evasive. The nettles had uncovered gaps in his defences, and his calves and ankles were burning.
He turned over and made a determined effort to compose himself, but he could reach no more than the borderland of sleep. It was a land of shadows, where darker shadows moved. Helpless, hopeless ghosts who turned their faces away when he tried to identify them and wandered off, sobbing. It was daylight before he dozed off.
At eleven o’clock on the following evening he was ringing the doctor’s bell. The surgery window was dark, confirming that the last of the evening callers had gone, and there was a light on in the front room downstairs, from which he could hear the sound of music.
For a long minute after he had rung nothing happened. He noticed that there was an optic in the door and guessed that he was under observation. Then the door swung open and Dr. Ramchunderabbas said, “The surgery’s shut. What do you want?” He was a burly figure and was standing in a way that blocked further advance.
David said, “If you’ll allow me inside for a few minutes, I’ll tell you. I’ve got a message from your suppliers. It’s for you, mister, not for the whole street.”
There was another long pause. What was evidently puzzling the doctor was the discrepancy between his visitor’s disreputable appearance and the authoritative way in which he spoke.
Then he said, “You can come in, but no funny business.”
David followed him into the front room. A cold meal was laid on the table, and a television set was humming softly. The doctor switched it off and said, “Well?”
By this time David was feeling a lot more comfortable. If the doctor had been on the level he would have slung him out and telephoned the police.
He said, “I understand that you’ve been experiencing some difficulty over some supplies.”
“Supplies of what?”
“Heroin.”
“So?”
“I am afraid that the difficulties are going to increase. There has been a hitch.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m wasting my time and yours.”
David swung on his heel and made for the door.
“Don’t let’s play games,” said the doctor. “If you’ve got something to say, come back, sit down and say it.”