Princes Gate (2 page)

“I’ll take the man, you do her.” Stan whispered.

He found the cosh in his pocket as he ran towards the couple. His arm flashed through the night air. The man fell heavily to the ground as Sid put his arm round the woman’s shoulder and clamped one hand on her mouth. His other hand held a knife with which he stroked her neck. “Keep your mouth shut darling and everything will be alright.”

The woman squirmed and he nicked her. The clouds parted and he could see the thin scarlet trickle on her pale skin. She became still.

Stan knelt down beside the unconscious man and, in businesslike fashion, went through his pockets. A thick wallet, several notes and coins and a pocket watch emerged. He chuckled as he rose to his feet, pulled the woman’s handbag from her hands and looked inside. “Our lucky night” – he removed more notes and coins, a compact and a cigarette lighter – “and look at this.” A pearl necklace was roughly torn from her, as were her rings and bracelets. Stan stuffed his own pockets and Sid’s with the takings. The man on the ground was breathing heavily and clouds of steam rose into the frozen air about him.

“A big one, isn’t he? Good job I caught him proper.” Stan turned his attention again to the woman. He unbuttoned her coat and ran his hands over the smooth fabric of her dress. “This one’s quite a sweetheart. Perhaps we’ve got time for a bit of fun before we go. Her boyfriend’s going to be in the land of nod for a while. Let’s…”

The sound of a car’s brakes screeching nearby interrupted him. He thought he could see a car up towards the bridge. The moon came out of the clouds again and now he could see figures at the side of the car. There was a flash of red and then of white. He could hear a man’s voice shouting and a woman’s responding. Then a man’s voice again. Was it the same man or another? He couldn’t tell and he couldn’t make out any words. A woman’s voice started again, a strained and anxious voice. Sighing, he turned back to his female victim and stroked her cheek. “Better not push our luck, eh, dear? You’d have enjoyed it, though.” He patted her bottom. “Let’s hop it.”

Sid released his grip on the woman, pulled back his fist and hit her hard in the stomach. As she slipped to the ground they ran off as fast as they could, their pockets jangling with their takings. They didn’t stop until they reached the gardens in front of the Savoy. They fell onto a bench and, when they’d recovered their breath, they could hear nothing except the light snoring of a tramp in the bushes behind.

CHAPTER 1

Monday January 22nd 1940

Patches of snow covered the riverbank and small ice floes drifted along in the river. The sky was a brilliant blue and the Colonel wished he’d brought along his old military goggles to shield his eyes from the glare. His next-door neighbour, Thompson, a city broker, had told him over a friendly sherry the night before that his office colleagues were running a book on it proving the coldest winter of the century. The freezing weather meant that his regular morning walk had been brisker than usual and, by his reckoning, as he approached Barnes Bridge he was probably ten minutes ahead of schedule.

The ugly metal latticework of the bridge sparkled in the sun as he strode along the river path, thinking happily of the bacon and eggs awaiting him at home. When he was almost under the bridge, a large boat chugged by creating a wake, which flowed rapidly towards the shore. It was high tide and, before he had time to take evasive action, several waves splashed over the bank and onto his best tweed trousers. Swearing loudly he turned to wave his walking stick uselessly at the boat, a working barge heading up river. He bent down to mop his trouser legs with a handkerchief. As he rose stiffly, having made little improvement to the sodden state of his turn-ups, his eyes roved over the flotsam gently pushing up against the riverbank. There was the usual mixture of empty tin-cans, beer bottles, newspapers, wrapping paper, sticks and branches. However, in an area of water near the bridge, at the point where the sharp glare of the daylight became subsumed in the dark shadow of the bridge, the Colonel’s attention was caught by an object which, because of the intermittent dazzle, appeared as if caught in the flashing beam of a semaphore light.

He reached out with his stick and poked the whitish object a few times but couldn’t get it to move towards him. Edging closer to the water’s edge, he was grasping a stanchion of the bridge for support when he heard the engine of another boat. He scrambled back up the bank and watched a small cruiser pass under the bridge on the far side of the river. There were no waves to worry about this time and his gaze returned to the floating object. His heart pounded as he realised with horror that he was looking at a human hand, attached to a body which was slowly rising to the surface. He took a couple of very deep breaths. The body appeared to be female and clothed in pale pink underwear, but he didn’t have the stomach for close analysis. The empty eye socket was enough for him. He took another deep breath and headed for the police station, which was just a short distance up the road.

Detective Chief Inspector Frank Merlin stared angrily out of his window at the barrage balloon drifting aimlessly above the London County Council headquarters. He had timed his discussion with Assistant Commissioner Gatehouse badly. As he had entered his boss’s office he should have realised that something was amiss from the deep red tinge of the A.C.’s cheeks.

“May I have a few words with you, sir?”

“Yes, but ‘a few’ means ‘a few’ and be sharp about it.”

“I wondered if you’d given any further thought to my request of the other day?”

“Request? What request? Oh, you mean your request to leave me in the lurch and enlist?”

“Er – yes sir. I would like to volunteer to join up as we discussed.”

“Merlin, I have just come from a deeply unpleasant meeting with the Commissioner and the Home Secretary. Sir John may appear in public to have the animation of an elderly Scots Presbyterian undertaker, but I can tell you that in private he has a little more vim about him. I have just been berated for over an hour on the numerous failings of the part of the Metropolitan Police under my command.

“Sir John Anderson tells me that while our nation currently stands at perhaps its greatest ever peril, he would sleep better at night if we, or rather I, would get off my backside and get a grip on, in no particular order of importance, Irish republican bombers, pilfering dockers and factory workers, Mosleyite fifth columnists and the numerous ruffians and thieves taking advantage of the blackout, not to mention the rocketing accident statistics caused by the murderous driving habits of most after-dark drivers. This I am required to do when I have already lost, or am about to lose, large numbers of my brightest youngsters to the forces, and several of my best senior people have been seconded to the Government for security purposes. At this moment you, probably the finest detective I have, having already done a good bit for King and Country in the last show, want to bugger off and get your head blown off with the British Expeditionary Force.”

“But sir …”

“No. The answer is no. Your country and, more specifically, I need you here and that’s final. Don’t think I don’t appreciate the sentiments but if all my best officers disappear, chaos will ensue – and chaos, Frank, is worth a hundred divisions to Herr Hitler. Just think of it that way. Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

Merlin fumbled in his jacket pocket for the packet of Fisherman’s Friends. He had become strangely addicted to these powerful menthol lozenges over the past year. As he took his fix his eyes refocused on his reflection in the glass of the windowpane. A lock of jet-black hair hung over his forehead. He needed a haircut. His dark green eyes stared back at him. His hand rose to his cheek. A few more creases there. Eight years to go till he was fifty. His father had been an old man at that age. Still, he didn’t look so bad. He had a long, narrow, rather elegant nose and a full mouth. His laughter lines remained despite his recent tribulations. There was no fat on his face and he had the same collar size as when he was eighteen. He had a trim, lean figure on which his suits hung well, as Alice had often remarked.

Behind him in the reflection, he could see the office which had become his second home. He’d had it since his promotion just over three years ago – that would be just six months after he got married. There was the solid oak desk he’d picked up for nothing on the Portobello Road to replace the rickety Scotland Yard standard issue. The desk was always swamped with papers. Tidiness had never been his strong point. His comfortable battered leather chair sat behind the desk, facing two less comfortable companions on the other side. In the corner was a small table and another chair mostly used by his trusty Sergeant – someone else whose military ambitions had been thwarted, though for different reasons. When he’d moved into the office, the walls had been a dreary green colour and he’d insisted, to the irritation of the A.C., on having them repainted off-white. On the wall facing the window was a large-scale map of London, beside an ornate cuckoo clock acquired on a fraud goose-chase in Switzerland a couple of years earlier. Behind him was a picture of a 1924 police football team, featuring a blurry picture of him at the back right-hand corner. On the wall facing his desk were two Van Gogh prints – he loved the post-Impressionists and the mad Dutchman most of all. He had a print of a Goya painting too – a firing squad in action somewhere in Spain, or was it Mexico? He’d never found out. This was to the left of the office door which, half-paned with frosted glass, was in turn to the left of the London map. The floor was linoleum but he’d put down a couple of intricately patterned red Persian rugs to liven things up a little – again modestly-priced acquisitions from the Portobello Road.

He shook his head and looked down at the lunchtime throng trudging through the snow and ice beneath him. Time for a walk to clear his head, he thought.

Turning out of the Yard on to the Embankment, he made for Parliament Square. It was as cold as he could remember and the Thames was frozen over in several places. His navy overcoat was getting a bit threadbare and the wind shearing off the river hit him like a knife as he rounded the corner at Westminster Bridge. He needed a new overcoat really, and some new suits, shirts and shoes would not go amiss. He’d been quite fussy and proud about his clothes and appearance for most of his adult life, but since his wife’s death he’d let himself go a little in that department – well, no, if he was being honest, he’d let himself go a lot. His brother’s wife Beatrice had nagged him about this and other things, and had recently started making small contributions of her own. Fortunately she had good taste.

The news posters outside the tube station had moved on from the most recent parliamentary cause célèbre, the forced resignation of the War Minister, Hore-Belisha, and were now focusing on Russia’s invasion of Finland. “Russians press forward. Finnish resistance fighting fiercely.” Merlin smiled to himself as he thought of his good friend, Jack Stewart, staunch socialist and supporter of the Soviet experiment. He looked forward to hearing him tie himself in knots trying to justify Stalin’s motives for the attack on the hapless Finns.

After a quick circuit of Parliament Square, he had got most of the A.C.’s bile out of his system and he stepped into Tony’s Café for a hot drink.

Frank Merlin had been born Francisco Diego Merino, the eldest of three children, in the Limehouse district of East London, in September 1897. His father, Javier Merino, a shepherd’s son from Northern Spain, had managed to escape a life of backbreaking rural poverty by making his way, at seventeen, to the bustling port of Corunna and going to sea. After twelve years of circling the globe on merchant vessels small and large, he had tired of the seaman’s life and had dropped anchor in the port of London. After a brief unhappy period when he had to scratch his living on the streets as a dancer and singer of romantic ballads, his dark good looks had caught the discerning eye of Agnes Cutler, daughter of Alfred Cutler, the proprietor of Limehouse’s largest chandlery store. Javier was personable and good with figures and his wife, as Agnes swiftly became, soon ensured that he was installed as her father’s right-hand man. In due course, on his father-in-law’s retirement, Javier became general manager of the store. Three children had arrived in quick succession – Francisco, Carlos and Maria. Shortly after his daughter was born, Javier, finally tired of the laboured efforts of his friends, neighbours and customers to pronounce his name properly, and Anglicised it. He became Harry, while for good measure his sons became Frank and Charlie, and his daughter Mary. A short time afterwards, Alfred decided to make his son-in-law his full partner and Javier took this opportunity to lose the Spanish surname as well. It reminded him of those damned sheep he’d had to chase around those arid, rocky, Spanish crags back when he was young. An intelligent, self-educated and well-read man, he had always loved the Arthurian legends. So Javier Merino became Harry Merlin, and Cutlers Chandlery became Cutler and Merlin’s Limehouse Chandlery Emporium.