No Escape (18 page)

“I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

“And I can't oblige. So what?”

“So I'll find out by other means,” Garrod said, easily, getting up and leaving the cabin quickly before Winter realised what he was about to do.

On deck he untied the painter of the dinghy, slid down into it, and with the rope still gathered in his hand, gave the cruiser's gunwhale a hard push that shot him across the short space towards the next boat upstream. Even so the swift tide now running took him down to the second boat below this, the one from which he had been pulled across at slack water on the flood half an hour before.

Giles Winter was raging on the deck of the cabin cruiser.

“Sorry,” Garrod called. “I'll tie your dinghy up here. You'll have to get one of the other chaps to return it to you.”

“You bloody fool!” Giles yelled. “Loosing off like that! You might have gone down among the barges, without me holding you!”

Exactly, Garrod thought. With Winter holding the painter and then letting it go he might have been among the barges and sucked under them and that would have been the end of him.

He called, “Sorry!” once more and climbing carefully from deck to deck of the three boats near the wall, got back to the land without looking round again. He did look back, however, as he reached his car, parked behind the tow path. The deck of the cabin cruiser was empty; Winter had gone below.

Back at the Yard Garrod found a report from the laboratory. The poppet beads contained two drugs. Some held a form of hemp. Others contained heroin. There was a slight difference in size in the two, enough to show the initiated what they were eating.

Another report told him that Francis Hill, the uncouth young man who had appeared in such an elusive fashion to Jane Wheelan, seemed to have left his lodgings. He was not available on the telephone. His studio door was locked; no one came to open it in spite of prolonged ringing. The rooms were rented unfurnished, by a landlord who lived in Bedford. The rent had been paid regularly, in quarterly amounts. The rest of the property, a mews over garages, was let in similar fashion. Most of the inmates were out all day. They had very little to do with each other. One of them, questioned, thought Hill had gone home for a holiday. He had spoken of doing so. His parents were living and quite well off. As a rule Hill avoided other people.

Garrod decided that the drug report was sufficient reason for more drastic action to find Hill. He was not surprised when he reached the mews, where the row of so-called studios housed a collection of near-tramps, to hear again that Francis Hill had not been seen about for several days.

Nor was he really surprised, though he blamed himself severely, when he and two officers with him forced the door, to find the young man dead. But the manner of his death was both a surprise and a shock. For Hill had not succumbed to his drug addiction or committed suicide on account of it. He had been brutally and violently murdered, fighting for his life in a struggle that had wrecked his room, scattered his pathetically inadequate paintings, overturned his meagre sticks of furniture and had even started a fire near his small open grate. Fortunately this had encountered a flood of water from an overturned jug and had petered out.

“Or he survived long enough to pour the water on it,” Garrod said, grimly assessing the young man's injuries.

This view was upheld by the experts. Francis Hill had been dead for two or three days. He had died from multiple injuries, chiefly stab wounds and blows from a blunt weapon that had wrecked his face without cracking his skull.

The ash from the fire outside the hearth was unproductive. No drugs were found in the room, only traces were discovered in Hill's body. But these were suggestive. The most important find was discovered where his murderers had failed to find it, in the lining of his jacket, reached through a tear in one of the pockets. This was a scrap of paper, dirty, torn, the writing on it almost indecipherable. But just clear enough.

When Garrod saw it he put a call through to Professor Marsden. While he waited to get through he stared down at the grimy scrap on his desk. What he saw was a row of numerals and of these the first two were familiar. They were the same two numbers that appeared first in line on the folded paper hidden in the spool of the blue film. Above them, on Hill's slip, was the one word, in brackets, ‘cafe'.

Professor Marsden listened to Garrod's account of young Hill's death with an expression of growing horror. But when the slip of paper was placed before him, this changed to his habitual look of intelligent interest. Without any prompting he said, “It begins like the other, doesn't it?”

“Exactly. With a most considerate clue beside or rather above those two figures.”

“Café without the accent. Caife, in fact. An address?”

“I think so. We're still checking with the probable divisions.”

“Which do you consider the probable divisions?”

“North of the river to start with. Anything that would come within a few miles radius of Bream's photographic establishment. That would include Chelsea, Kensington and a slice north of the parks, Shepherd's Bush, Notting Hill, Bayswater, perhaps.“

“A wide field. Good luck to you. When you say north of the parks does that take you out as far as Hampstead or at least Camden Town?”

“Why do you say that?” Garrod was a little startled.

“You are prospecting in the student dormitory areas, aren't you?”

“Well, yes.”

The professor was very much on the ball, Garrod decided. In view of what he wanted to ask him to do, there could be no harm in putting him a little further into the picture. He told Marsden about the beads.

The professor took this more quietly than the news of the artist's death.

“That fits,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “So now you're after the distribution, I suppose. In which this paper and these figures may be relevant.”

“Yes. The caife is in Camden Town, we think.”

The professor laughed.

“My bull's eye was quite fortuitous, I do assure you.”

“I believe you, sir. There is only one establishment of the kind with a street number corresponding to those two numerals. It must be the headquarters of this particular organisation. A branch one, perhaps. If we aren't entirely off the beam we might flush them there.”

“How? How do I come into it?”

Superintendent Garrod leaned forward and explained his plan.

Later that evening Professor Marsden with a companion halted outside the small insignificant eating house in a side street off the busy main road through Camden Town. They had travelled by bus to Mornington Crescent and had walked from there. When they reached the café, Marsden checked the house number once more and then, pushing the curtained, half-glassed door, went in.

The place was larger inside than he expected. A narrow front portion flanked with tables on either side turned a corner near a pay-desk to spread out into a rear part where three rows of tables gave quite comfortable seating space to the customers.

There was a fair number of people already eating, both men and women. Three family parties with small, thin, dark children, had grouped two or more of the tables together. Most of the customers, Marsden saw, were Mediterranean types. Here and there an obvious Englishman sat with a dark-eyed, sallow-complexioned girl. At other tables there were groups of young men and girls from India or the Far East.

Professor Marsden, ignoring a waved indication from the pay-desk, chose a table against the wall in the wider part of the café. His companion sat down opposite. The professor smiled at him.

“I told you we should have an ethnically interesting evening,” he said.

The other flashed a brilliant smile at him. He was, himself, of Middle Eastern birth, in London studying law. He had met the professor at a club frequented by his compatriots, and being a clever, cultivated young man, had made the most of the acquaintance. It had been a surprise, a relief, an unusual interest to exchange views with a man who not only had a profound academic knowledge of his native land, its history and culture, but also spoke his language fluently, idiomatically and without noticeable accent.

A waiter approached. Marsden said to his companion in English, “You order. You'll know what we ought to have.”

The waiter, in very halting English, began to explain, but the law student, speaking softly in his own tongue, suggested other dishes.

Marsden watched carefully. The waiter showed no surprise, made a few scratched marks on a pad and left in the direction of the kitchen. But out of the corner of his eye the professor saw him pause at the pay-desk, murmur something to the woman in charge there and then pass on through the service swing door. Immediately afterwards the woman picked up a speaking tube from below her desk and spoke into it. Almost at once a stout black-haired individual with a large, pale face came out of a door on the side of the desk opposite that of the service door and waddling past their table disappeared from Marsden's view.

“We will speak in French,” the professor said, lightly. “I think he will not understand that.”

“The waiter heard you use English,” the law student replied, thoughtfully, also in French.

“True. And you instructed him in your own language.”

“But I don't think he understood properly. He is an Arab, I think. He took down the numbers of the dishes I pointed to, not the names.”

“The man who has just come in, who looks to me like the manager, has obviously been called by madam on our account. You noticed the waiter spoke to her?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the fat man now? Can you see him? I didn't turn round.”

“In the corner behind you, four tables away. He is clearly concentrating on our conversation. He is certainly European. I think we should use a different language.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Persian,” said the law student, unexpectedly.

Professor Marsden laughed.

“Very well,” he said, using the Persian equivalent.

The law student blushed.

“I am not as fluent as you,” he said, “but for our present purpose I can manage, I hope.”

Their food came almost immediately. It was too greasy, Marsden decided, but much better than he had dared to hope. In the equivalent English café, he decided, the fried alternative would have been uneatable.

They ate slowly, exchanging solemn remarks in Persian. From time to time the professor's companion reported on the activities of the fat man in the corner.

“He is drinking Turkish coffee,” he said, “and looking very puzzled. A little—” he broke into English, “bored. I don't know how to say that in Persian.”

Marsden gave him a long and rather flowery rendering. They both laughed. The fat man, the student said, with relish, now looked very sour.

While they were drinking their coffee the professor signalled to the waiter for the bill. By now most of the tables in the café were filled and the noise of conversation in several languages and all at a high pitch effectively covered any remarks the two might exchange.

Before the waiter came back, Marsden handed his companion the scrap of paper found in Hill's jacket.

“Now we have come to your part in this expedition,” he said, leaning a little closer to the young man. “I shall speak a few words to the waiter and sort out some coins in my hand. While I am doing this I want you to slip him the paper and watch carefully what he does with it. I shall visit the Gents and then pay my bill at the desk before coming back to the table.”

The law student began to look alarmed.

“You will not leave me alone? What do you expect to happen?”

“I don't quite know. But I can guess.”

“Then tell me. Tell me!”

“No. Better not. If they come over and question you, you just say you were asked to hand in the paper and receive the answer.”

“Receive—? But what answer? Another paper, a verbal message—? I am very unwilling—”

“Hush! The waiter is coming back. Don't worry at all. I shall be away a very few minutes.”

The law student leaned back in his chair. His attitude was tense, his black eyes very bright, his whole appearance far too conspiratorial, Marsden decided. He sighed. For the first time he wondered if his simple plan was too simple and if the answer would come in simple, brutal, physical terms. In which case he and his ally were obvious losers.

But the waiter was now beside him, so he suppressed his sudden anxieties and bringing up a handful of coin from his pocket he began to sort out a generous tip, at the same time praising the meal in Arabic. When he looked up, holding out the tip in his palm, he met an eager, flushed face and eyes behind which some message struggled for expression.

Disregarding the rapid, whispered thanks of the waiter Marsden got up and moved in a slow dignified manner to the marked door at the end of the room. To reach it he passed the fat man's table. The latter was in the act of rising and seemed nearly as excited as the waiter had been.

When Professor Marsden reached the pay-desk the law student was already standing there, waiting.

“I have paid,” he said and turned towards the door. Marsden followed him, asking no questions.

They stood for a moment outside the café. Across the road the professor saw a sports car with a man inside it, who was leaning sideways to read his newspaper by the light of the street lamp under which he was parked.

Marsden took the law student's arm and turned left down the street. The lights of the main road blazed ahead, about a hundred yards away. They began to walk towards them.

But glancing round a few seconds later Marsden saw the man in the sports car jump out and hurry across the road into the café.

“We will walk faster,” he said and added, “What happened?”

“They brought me a carton like for sweets,” said the law student in English. “The fat man brought it on a plate and put it down on our table without speaking. The carton had a label with Turkish delight written on it.”