Copyright & Information

They Never Looked Inside

(He Didn’t Mind Danger)

First published in 1948

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Michael Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

EAN	ISBN	Edition
0755105079	9780755105076	Print
0755132084	9780755132089	Kindle
0755132459	9780755132454	Epub

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

Born in Lincolnshire, England, Michael Francis Gilbert graduated in law from the University of London in 1937, shortly after which he first spent some time teaching at a prep-school which was followed by six years serving with the Royal Horse Artillery. During World War II he was captured following service in North Africa and Italy, and his prisoner-of-war experiences later leading to the writing of the acclaimed novel ‘Death in Captivity’ in 1952.

After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor in London, but his writing continued throughout his legal career and in addition to novels he wrote stage plays and scripts for radio and television. He is, however, best remembered for his novels, which have been described as witty and meticulously-plotted espionage and police procedural thrillers, but which exemplify realism.

HRF Keating stated that ‘Smallbone Deceased’ was amongst the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "The plot," wrote Keating, "is in every way as good as those of Agatha Christie at her best: as neatly dovetailed, as inherently complex yet retaining a decent credibility, and as full of cunningly-suggested red herrings." It featured Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who went on to appear in later novels and short stories, and another series was built around Patrick Petrella, a London based police constable (later promoted) who was fluent in four languages and had a love for both poetry and fine wine. Other memorable characters around which Gilbert built stories included Calder and Behrens. They are elderly but quite amiable agents, who are nonetheless ruthless and prepared to take on tasks too much at the dirty end of the business for their younger colleagues. They are brought out of retirement periodically upon receiving a bank statement containing a code.

Much of Michael Gilbert’s writing was done on the train as he travelled from home to his office in London: "I always take a latish train to work," he explained in 1980, "and, of course, I go first class. I have no trouble in writing because I prepare a thorough synopsis beforehand.". After retirement from the law, however, he nevertheless continued and also reviewed for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, as well as editing ‘The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes’.

Gilbert was appointed CBE in 1980. Generally regarded as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the British crime writing fraternity, he was a founder-member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, before receiving the Lifetime ‘Anthony’ Achievement award at the 1990 Boucheron in London.

Michael Gilbert died in 2006, aged ninety three, and was survived by his wife and their two sons and five daughters.

Prologue With Violence

The complete stillness of suspended animation. The stillness of held breath. The stillness of checked movement; and round it the darkness.

It was a cold blackness, but dusty, and Rod was plagued with the fear that he might break into the father and mother of all sneezes. He was watching the thin grey streak, as he had been watching it now for the past five minutes. It seemed like hours. The streak was vertical, not horizontal, and it represented the edge of a door standing two inches ajar. The door was at the top of a flight of stairs which ran down from the first floor to the half-landing. And the greyness was all that was left, at that distance and infiltration, of the electric light in the basement room where the caretaker sat.

A glow-worm came and went ten feet away, and Rod guessed that “Gunner” was using his pencil torch with discretion. There followed an interminable period of scratching. (Lock picking was all very well, he reflected, when done in the comfort and security of the back room, with friends to quiz and applaud. Even when you were blindfolded and had to work by guess and by God with a stop watch against you.)

This was It. This was the real thing. This was a job. Which made things both easier and more difficult. More interesting, certainly. In the sixteen years of his life he had never known anything to touch it.

Another snap – disastrously loud. Gunner was certainly off form. It was Sunday night. No, wrong again, it must be Monday morning by now, and getting on, too. Without shifting his position he looked down at the watch on his thin wrist. The luminous paint was chipped and worn but he was able from practice to make it out. Half-past three already.

For some seconds now Gunner had been silent. The torch was out, so presumably he was using both hands, one for the “lifter” and one for the “shifter”. Came a slurring sound, quite unlike anything which had gone before, followed by a soft click.

Good; that meant the office door would open. Here it came, throwing a widening band of yellow down the passage. Rod was disconcerted for a moment, then remembered that the full moon must have swung over their heads during the hours they had sat in the darkness.

He could see Gunner quite plainly, outlined against the window, moving from side to side. He was working quietly, opening the drawers of the big desk.

The temptation became too much for Rod. He knew that his job was to stay by the landing door; but surely – the old fool in the basement must be asleep over his gas fire by now. He hadn’t made a move for more than three hours.

Rod moved into the office, stooping first, as he had been taught, to sight the furniture against the window. As he came up to Gunner’s elbow the pencil light came on again for a moment and he heard his companion draw in his breath.

A thin key, but in the one glance unmistakably a safe key. The little torch came into play again on the great flat green door of the safe, as Gunner, with his thick, workmanlike fingers, slid up the cover plate of the lock.

Two keyholes presented themselves, set like the hands of a clock showing twenty minutes to eleven.

Unconsciously both man and boy had dropped their former furtiveness and silence and were moving with an almost contemptuous freedom. The torch was never off now. Again, and then again Gunner bent and twisted the key. The sweat was pouring from the palms of his hands.

He took the key right out, waited for a moment and then slid it back. It went home with such a true, sweet feel that he knew it must be the right one. But shift it would not.

Then, as clearly as if they had been spoken behind his shoulder, the words came to him: “Never pull against the handle. Let the handle do its own work.”

“Put your weight on the handle,” he said. “No, put your gloves on first.” The man pulled a pair of woollen gloves out of his pocket.

As Gunner tugged the great brass handle it moved appreciably. The key came through with a soft slurring noise and the safe door swung back.

Something registered in Rod’s brain and life flowed on again. It was the watchman, no doubt of that, but he hadn’t heard them. If he had heard them he wouldn’t be moving in that particular unhurried way. There was no time to shut the safe, so it had to be – the other thing.

He could hear the complaining whine and grunt of the old man’s breath as he came up the last flight. Grey streak had turned to yellow. He was carrying a torch, then.

It was a beautiful little weapon, fashioned of closely woven net round a hard flexible core made with infinite care out of hundreds of scraps of tinfoil and silver paper. It had a thong to go round the wrist and a grip of smooth leather.

The watchman reached the last step and paused, regurgitated heavily, and opened the door.

It was a clumsy blow, for he was standing awkwardly, and the edge of the door had made sighting difficult. But it was heavy enough to be effective. The torch fell to the floor but did not go out. The man gave a grunt as though all breath had been driven from his body, and folded forward on to his knees.

Rod took a step back and a careful aim at the bowed neck. The deliberation with which he did this was delicious.

Then he bent down and reached to switch off the torch beside the figure, now still. As he did so he heard a quick patter of steps and most unexpectedly a little white dog came into view. It was a terrier, as old, and almost as asthmatic as its master. Plainly both puzzled and alarmed.

Rod was as completely at a loss as he had been master of the situation a moment before.

The dog drew back his upper lip in the beginnings of a snarl as Rod stepped towards him.

The dog whined and then growled softly, pulling with his teeth at the old man’s coat sleeve.

At that moment the dog chose to seal his fate by barking. Gunner hit the dog inexpertly: first much too softly, and then, from inexperience, a great deal too hard, breaking the skull.

Rod felt sick – then, with a tardy return of toughness, wiped the cosh on the coat of the still silent watchman.

Both man and boy wore canvas containers slung by straps from their shoulders, sort of light ammunition pouches, worn over the shirt and under the waistcoat. Into them went the contents of the safe. These were considerable.

Diamond rings, signet rings, white metal watches. A little diamond bracelet watch, gold watches. There was a drawer full of old gold pieces and two or three dozen loose stones. The last drawer in the safe was locked and they guessed that it had cash in it. Probably the key was on the owner’s ring in his pocket. People did things like that – left the safe key in a desk and then, with asinine carefulness, carried off the key of one of the drawers.

Whilst Gunner tried to wedge it open Rod went back once more to look at the watchman.

Gunner was plainly making no impression on the little steel drawer. He had neither the room to develop his strength on it nor the skill to pick the tiny lock.

Outside in New Oxford Street an early morning car came slowly past, seemed for a moment to be slowing down; Rod’s heart thumped; at the last moment the driver accelerated and passed on.

Five minutes later they were standing in the back courtyard, dusting from knees and elbows the marks of the slither from the outhouse roof.

Upstairs the watchman groaned, sat up, was sick, saw the dog and began to swear.

Stumpi was a “White” Russian. Or rather, was thought by the boys to be “white” on the grounds that had he been “red” he would have been chasing the rackets in his native Moscow and not in London. He kept a tiny all-night restaurant called “The Bandbox”, situated in the street which bounds the northern hinterland of Leicester Square and is blanked off on one side by the backs of the big cinemas. Little was known about him except that he kept three mistresses, all in the West Central postal district. (“It saves travelling,” he used to say. “I am too old to voyage.”)

Thither Rod and the Gunner came, at a cautious hundred yards interval. The clock at the corner of the Charing Cross Road showed half-past four and morning was not far away.

In the steamy little Bandbox there was only one customer. A rat-like person who looked up incuriously as the Gunner came in – with growing interest when Rod followed and sat down at the same table. After that first quick glance he never looked at them directly again and five minutes later he paid his bill and shuffled out.

III

In the duty room at the Yard the Junior Inspector hung up the receiver and lifted his head as Hazlerigg came in.

“Small jewellers – they coshed the watchman, but he wasn’t out long. We’ve just had him on the phone. I’ve sent the patrol car. There should be something soon.”

“Three in one night,” said Hazlerigg. “All jewellers.” The bell went again. Hazlerigg picked up the extension. “Sergeant Martin, sir. 66 New Oxford Street. I’m speaking from the caretaker’s room. I’ve got the caretaker here. One thing might be helpful. He tells me he always went round the offices at twenty to four sharp. He was knocked out as he got to the top landing.”

The Junior Inspector was looking at his log sheet and interrupted: “We got his message at five to four.”

“Just so, sir. He can’t have been out more than ten minutes or thereabouts – must have come round just as they were going. They got out of a passage window, judging from the marks they left. There’s a small courtyard there. The door’s open.”

“Ask him,” said Hazlerigg, “if there were any signs of a car having stood in the passage way.”

The Junior Inspector put this question and it was obvious from the silence with which it was received that Sergeant Martin didn’t know.

“He’s going to look now,” said the Inspector. “He’s a good chap. Lots would have chanced it and said ‘No’.”

A constable brought in two cups and they were sipping the hot dark tea gratefully when the bell went again.

“X Division,” said the Inspector. “This does sound interesting. Yes. Go on.”

The Inspector reached out as he was listening and pressed a button. A red light came up on the panel. “Two cars with full crews,” he said, “and warn three and four.” The light blinked and went out. “Are you going, sir?”

“Yes, sir—saw them five minutes ago, just by chance, coming into Stumpi’s joint.”

Gunner and Rod had finished an early breakfast of sausages and chips served by the taciturn Stumpi, and were sitting over their second cup of coffee.

Gunner was almost asleep. Rod, on the other hand, felt both fresh and alert. He possessed that quality, rare in a man and almost unknown in a boy, of being able to “back pedal” in moments of danger and stress, and this gave him the advantage of being able to coast quietly through the reactionary period that followed. It is a quality which distinguishes the greatest generals.

Where Gunner had been talkative and excited, he had been taciturn almost to the point of rudeness. And now that Gunner nodded, he was doing some thinking.

In particular he was thinking about the second part of the instructions he had had from the Chief the night before. They were all right as far as they went, but they didn’t seem to Rod to go quite far enough. It had been impressed on them that they must keep away from the meeting-place until a respectable hour in the morning— “say ten o’clock,” the Chief had said. “Get yourself something to eat and then have a wash and brush up. Don’t go home—and don’t wander about the streets unnecessarily.”

Well, that was fair enough. Only mugs wandered about the streets in the small hours; it was asking to be picked up by a nosey slop looking for promotion. But it left a lot of time to kill. Then again, Stumpi might be okay – the boys said he was – and again he might not. He sat blinking at them from behind the corner table, apparently unwearied by his all-night session.

On an impulse Rod got to his feet and asked: “Where’s the Gents?” Stumpi nodded at a curtained recess at the back. Rod found the filthy little water closet, and found something more: a door, leading out to a pint-sized area with an iron staircase. The door was bolted. Rod unbolted it. He made his way back to the shop and as he put his hand up to pull the curtain aside a great many things seemed to happen at once.

The first thing his eye caught, through the steamy front window, was the bonnet of a large black car, coasting to a standstill. Then the shop front seemed to irrupt as huge figures tumbled through the door. He saw Gunner on his feet swinging a chair and the crash of splintering wood was in his ears as he made the back door. A second later he was in the area and up the steps. A quick look showed him the street was empty.

Fast as his young legs carried him, a more elderly pair of legs was moving faster still. Hazlerigg had grasped the fact that one of his birds had flown and was round in his tracks and out of the door before Gunner had finished swinging his first chair.

Without stopping to open the door of the car he pushed his head and shoulders through the side window and seized the radio headset. “Hullo Three, hullo Four. Close on Cambridge Circus. Move fast.” The set crackled. “Hullo Three—move from Cambridge Circus down Shaftesbury Avenue—watch your left. Hullo Four—move from Cambridge Circus down Charing Cross Road. Watch your right. Look out for a youth: medium height, wearing no hat or coat. That is all. Acknowledge.”

As a result of these energetic measures, when Rod paused at the corner of Gerrard Street, he saved himself, for the second time, only by the quickness of his wits. He saw the police car a fraction of a second before it could have seen him, and turned on his tracks. Two minutes later he peered cautiously out of Newport Passage and realised the nature of the trap which was holding him.

His mind was still working. He had noticed, at the top end of Newport Passage, a row of tenement flats with a communal basement passage. Down into this he climbed. Stooping in the shadows he loosened the buckle under his coat and wriggled clear of the heavy satchel. Quietly he picked off the top of the nearest of the many dustbins and dropped it in. As quietly he put the lid back.

Then on hands and knees he crawled for the full length of the passage. There was a door at the end. It opened to his touch.

He found himself in a sort of connecting subway which ran under the tenement from Newport Passage to the fronting street. It was pitch dark and from its smell contained a further selection of refuse bins. But the sweetest-smelling haven could not have been more welcome.

The door had a bolt and he shot it gently, before moving cautiously forward among the empty milk bottles. The door at the other end, he found, was already locked. He sat down to wait.

An hour later Hazlerigg called off his cordon. Half an hour after it had gone Rod slipped out. He had no means of knowing whether the way was clear or not, but an irrational feeling possessed him that his luck would hold. He recovered the satchel and disappeared circumspectly in the general direction of Seven Dials.

“W’s The Warrior, Home From The Wars”

Major Angus McCann was sitting in the padded splendour of a celebrated West End Hotel. He was in a mood of roaring Bolshevism which far exceeded anything under the mere general heading of being “browned off “. Such a description was infinitely too tame and neutral.

It was the evening of his second day in England. Behind him lay six completed years of soldiering in the Commandos. He had spent a colourful fortnight in Norway in early 1940, and had sniffed at unguarded portions of the coast of France. He had gone out to North Africa in 1942 and later had dropped into the sea off the coast of Sicily and had lived to bless his peace-time love of long-distance swimming. At the end of 1943 he had returned to England and spent a glorious six months assaulting, in working hours, the larger landed estates in the South Midlands (this was known as “intensive training”) and wrecking many of the stately homes of England in a series of stupendous guest-nights. Finally, one day in early June of 1944, he had landed in Normandy and had marched to that celebrated bridge “where, to the sound of the pipes, the green berets and the red berets had met and intermingled.”

The familiar spirit which had preserved his skin in these fantastic episodes was now to be worked overtime, and had stepped in with a judicious bout of jaundice, severe enough to keep him out of the area of the Arnhem salient altogether. After that things had gone smoothly enough and he had been in no real danger until the week following the Armistice when he had tried to argue with a drunken Russian soldier in one of Berlin’s border-line restaurants.

Fortunately his ability to get under a table had exceeded the Russian’s ability to find his automatic pistol, and all had been smoothed over.

He ordered another glass of beer and tried to look happy when asked to pay two shillings for it.

Farther along the bar he observed two girls who appeared to be taking a great deal of time over their first drinks, and he entertained the unworthy suspicion that they were waiting for a good Samaritan to come and stand them the next one.

“Let ‘em wait,” said Major McCann ungallantly. (Actually they were school teachers from Saffron Walden engaged in seeing the night life of London. The blonde one taught Geography and the brunette took Physical Training. They drank their pink gins slowly because they disliked the taste of them. They will not appear again in this story.)

Major McCann imbibed some more beer. He was honest enough to realise that he himself was very largely to blame for his own feelings. He had little of substance to complain about. He was sound in wind and limb. He had somewhere to live. He had a little money.

He shared a flat with a very much elder sister, in the wilds of North Hampstead. She was an excellent cook and a thoroughly good “manager”. His bed was so soft and the sheets so exquisitely aired and laundered that he had scarcely slept a wink on his first night at home. True, she was not a sparkling conversationalist and it would have been a stretch of the imagination to have described her as a kindred spirit, her main interests being afternoon bridge and British Israel.

She had displayed an altogether unexpected interest in her brother’s activities in Egypt and he had been agreeably surprised thereat until it transpired that her sustaining hope had been that he might have secured some accurate measurements of the great pyramid. (They were, he gathered, connected in a vague but important way with the future of the United Nations and the development of atomic energy.)

Again he reminded himself with great fairness that it was unreasonable to be angry with anyone for being themselves and not someone else altogether. She had many excellent qualities, had survived the bombing and rocketing without stirring an inch from her appointed way of life, had undergone undoubted hardships, and had, by her own unaided efforts, saved two and a half tons of waste paper. There must be many worse people in London. Indeed, at that moment two of them came in. Major McCann felt his hackles rise as he viewed the newcomers, a man and a woman.

The man, he felt sure, was a stockbroker, and equally he felt sure that he was known to his friends as “The Major” (1914-18 vintage). His considerable body was too tightly encased in a suit which contrived to out-savile Savile Row and his startlingly pig-like face appeared at first sight to be a healthy brick-red; it was only on closer inspection that it became evident that this colour was produced by numberless little scarlet threads, the finger-prints left by high living and much old brandy. He was wearing the tie of a very well-known cricket club. His companion was a lacquered job, very partially dressed in that shade of jet satin best calculated to set off a dead white skin (or alternatively, thought McCann, the dead white skin had been superimposed as best calculated to show off the jet satin – in those days of coupons it was difficult to tell where art ended and economy began).

They were so perfectly suited to each other and to their present surroundings that it would have caused him no surprise had they headed a male and female chorus respectively, and started some song and dance ensemble.

Fitted to each other in one way, certainly. In others, he was not so sure. He fancied the man was more likely to get his fun out of warm and grubby little typists. And the woman? Well, as far as she looked human at all, he associated her with something Middle-Eastern.

He pictured her in bed with a certain Egyptian of his acquaintance, shuddered, and finished his beer.

Quite suddenly he felt that he had had enough. The whole place, its atmosphere, its decoration scheme, its sleek waiters and impossible clientele, took him by the throat. He seized his hat, disregarded the insinuating palm of the cloakroom attendant (whose worried expression was probably due to the fact that he was having difficulty with his surtax returns) and pushed out into the night.

“Ten past nine,” said McCann. Unlike some of his countrymen, he liked American soldiers. He had seen them fight.

The American produced two heavy, expensive-looking platinum timepieces and scrutinised them carefully.

“Coming up for nine minutes past nine right now,” he said. “Five—four—three—two—one—now.”

He wanted to find a pub as different as possible from the hotel he had just left. From his pre-war recollections, this was a promising area to start in.

“I beg your pardon,” said a small man, who seemed to have materialised from the pavement.

“That’s right – a public house: somewhere in these parts, unless it’s been blitzed.”

“Oh—ah—yes. I see.” Thinking it over he was not really surprised. “Perhaps,” he went on, “you could tell me the name of some other place.”

“Try the Leopard. First right, down the steps, right again, and on your right.”

As Major McCann, following these directions, approached his objective, so a sense of familiarity grew. And when he got there he recognised it quite easily, although it was (good God!) over ten years since he had been there. The faded signboard was the same, and he remembered the three awkward steps up to the saloon bar with the metal boot scraper at the bottom. He recollected vividly falling down the one on to the other, one frosty moonless night.

Pop Carter had been quite a celebrity in those far-off pre-war days. A man of middle height, thick build and indeterminate class. All things to all men. Hear him talking to the famous authors who came almost nightly to the public bar and you suspected him of having a broad and Catholic imagination – listen to him swapping stories with the commercials and you were sure of it. He had acted as his own chucker-out and had been an expert practitioner with the blackthorn truncheon which hung under the serving ledge. Had he not laid out with it “Rufus” Gavigan the very night that enterprising gentleman had finished attending to the London office of the Société Anonyme, and had come to celebrate his million franc haul on Pop’s Four Star, with the result that whilst policemen beat through the streets and restaurants, bars and brothels of the West End, Rufus lay happily unconscious in the casualty ward of the Middlesex Hospital.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I knew him well in the old days. Perhaps you remember him yourself.”

“I ought to,” said the woman. “He was my father.” She said it, however, without malice.

The Major really looked at her for the first time. He remembered, now, that Pop had possessed a wife, who sometimes “obliged” in the saloon bar, and a family who had never made a public appearance at all. He had heard that there was a daughter who had gone to a school “above her station”. This was probably the one. She seemed pleasant and capable.

She gave him a quick look and paid him the compliment of accepting a gin and lime.

“I remember your father,” he said, “a very remarkable man. Quite outstanding in his own line.”

“He was a dear,” said Miss Carter, with unexpected warmth. “You heard what happened to him?”

“He and Mother together—it happened about the end of the first Blitz. Were you in England then?”

“I never knew two people who took less notice of things like that. You know—bombs and noises. I used to be scared stiff. And when a big one came especially near I’d start downstairs for the shelter. Then I’d stop for a minute and listen at their door. And I’d hear them snoring. So I’d hop back into bed. Pride’s a funny thing.”

“So’s breeding,” thought the Major. “It sticks out a mile, wherever you find it.”

He was often surprised at the frequency with which perfect strangers confided their life histories to him. Only that morning a man from whom he had stopped to buy a newspaper at the corner of Panton Street had spent a quarter of an hour taking him through the details of a rather optimistic pension claim.

Miss Carter returned from serving a customer with whisky (of which she seemed to have an almost pre-war stock) and picked up her gin and lime and the thread of her story.

“After all,” she said, “the house never lost so much as a pane of glass. Mother and Father were killed walking down Regent Street. It was the last bomb of the last bad raid we had in the West End.”

She stared dreamily into the cloudy centre of her glass and the Major wondered what she was seeing in it. Metal, flame, smoke, destruction, mutilation. Cordite blackened clothes. Grey skin and the rich plum colour of newly shed blood.

“It used to worry me,” said Miss Carter. “Oh dear, how it used to worry me. But hard work’s a good cure for worry. The old man owned this place – freehold, goodwill and all. It’s not a brewer’s house, you know. And not a penny out on mortgage. I’ve been running it ever since. Coming, sir— same again ?”

It couldn’t be an easy place to run. The Leopard was not only a pub, it was a “Residential” as well. That is to say, it had half a dozen rooms available for bed and breakfast. If Pop Carter had liked you, you might stay there any time from six days to six months, a pleasant, rather hand-to-mouth existence which entailed taking your midday meal out and sharing the evening meal with the family. If Pop Carter had disliked you, your stay would have been more in the neighbourhood of six minutes, or even six seconds.

“I’ve got plenty of rooms,” he once said to a stout business man who appeared to be travelling with his secretary (possibly pressure of work dictated his idea that they should share the same bedroom) “but you’re not having one. And you can sue me for refusing to take you in. And if you do I shall charge you with stealing one of my silver tankards from the private bar. I lost three last week.”

Not that there had been much logic in the old man’s choices. It was just a question of like and dislike. He remembered “Glasgow”. She had been one of his oldest tenants. What had happened to her, he wondered.

Miss Carter anticipated the question by remarking as she returned: “If you knew Pop well, you probably met Miss Macduff.”

“She’s still with us – the last of the old faithfuls. Perhaps you’d like to run up and have a word with her. She moved up to Number Ten during the Blitz. Said the nearer she got to heaven the better. Do run up. She’d love to see you.”

Glasgow was sitting on the edge of her bed, comfortably if informally dressed in a polo-necked primrose sweater and a kimono; and, as the Major became increasingly aware, very little else. She raised at him the bland appraising look which had first set his heart beating to double time ten years and more since.

“Why, Angus – you’re a sight for sore eyes. Sit down and talk to an old woman.”

She cleared a space for him on the bed by sweeping a few of the things that were there already off on to the floor.

“London’s a cold sad place, these days. It’s only old friends that keep me from drink and worse.”

“What’s worse than drink, Glasgow?” he said, affectionately picking up her hand.

“Come away, come away,” said Miss Macduff sternly, giving him, nevertheless, an affectionate squeeze. “No tricks, now, or I’ll be obliged to scream.”

“Aye, too well. It’s good to see you, though. Will you take a cup of tea? Bide awhile, and I’ll put the kettle on.”

The Major had no real desire for tea on top of all the beer he had drunk, but hesitated to hurt her feelings. A compromise occurred to him.

“Leave the tea,” he said. “Get some knickers on and come down and have a drink in the private bar.”

Over a generous whisky Glasgow sat and listened to McCann’s opinion of the inhabitants of London.

“I’m not thin skinned,” he said, “but there’s no getting away from it, I have got a weakness for courtesy in the ordinary dealings of life. This morning, now, I jumped on to a bus which was waiting for the traffic lights. Apparently it was full up. Well, you could hardly describe that as my fault, could you? If it had happened before the war a firm but more or less polite conductor would have called my attention to the fact that I constituted one in excess of the lawful number appointed to be carried by the vehicle in question, and would have requested me to alight at the first stop. What happened today ? A henna-haired bitch (excuse me, Glasgow, she really was a bitch) started screaming at me from the top of the stairs. Since I was unable (fortunately) to understand what she was saying, and quite unable to dismount owing to the speed at which the bus was travelling, I took no action. Whereupon she descended the stairs and delivered a sharp and unexpected blow in the middle of my chest. It was only by clinging with the tenacity of a limpet that I managed to save my footing. I suppose my correct course of action would have been to have allowed myself to fall and break a leg and then to have sued the London Passenger Transport Board. Pah!”

“All conductresses are bitches,” said Glasgow soothingly. “Pray heaven we’ll soon have the boys back.”

“Then the tobacconists. Do you know, I’m already afraid to ask for a packet of cigarettes. You’d hardly think that such a simple matter could present any difficulties. I dare say you don’t even notice it? No. You’ve got used to it gradually. If it’s a man behind the counter you take your chance. You can be snappy and businesslike and adopt a sort of ‘no black market here’ tone of voice – or you can be man-to-man and confidential. In either case the result’s the same. You get no cigarettes – or ten of a brand you don’t want. If it’s a girl you feel compelled to act like a dago dancing partner making advances to a hat-check girl, in the faint hope that she’s got twenty Gold Flake under the counter.”

“All girls in tobacconists’ shops are bitches,” said Glasgow. “Have this one on me.”

At some period in the evening McCann had bought an evening paper and as Glasgow disappeared in quest of further whisky he pulled it out of his pocket and read on the front page:

Last night, and early this morning, two jewellers’ shops in Oxford Street were broken into. At the first, the thieves had a poor haul since they were unable to make any impression on the firm’s safe. At the other, the shop and premises of Cartwright & Gladstone, they removed articles to the value of £1,500, including watches, bracelets and loose stones. Mr. Finkelstein, the manager . . . [followed a long and unconvincing statement from Mr. Finkelstein, in which he tried, without conspicuous success, to explain away his folly in leaving the safe key in an unlocked drawer].

After a brutal attack on the night watchman, a Mr. Parrot, the intruders committed the wanton outrage of killing a white terrier belonging to the watchman, which had evidently tried to interfere with their nefarious activities.

A man has already been detained by the police in connection with the latter robbery.

It is not known whether the two affairs were connected, but certain similarities in technique suggest, etc., etc.

He retailed the story to Glasgow when she came back with the drinks. “Brutes like that deserve whipping,” he said.

“He’s paid to take risks,” said Glasgow. “Dogs are different. Poor dumb creature. People aren’t going to like that.”

The great British public would watch unmoved the despoliation of a hundred merchant jewellers and the stunning, binding, gagging and maltreating of their servants. But to hurt a dog or a child – that was unspeakable. Chief Inspector Hazlerigg knew this, too, and it was at his insistence that the newspapers had plugged the story.

The evening was attaining an alcoholic momentum of its own, and since good things never come singly the Major did not feel surprised when the door opened and Sergeant Dalgetty walked in.

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About the Author

1

Prologue With Violence

II

III

IV

V

2

“W’s The Warrior, Home From The Wars”