Ring of Terror (15 page)

‘I changed my mind at the last moment,’ said Silistreau. ‘Instead of taking the train from Ipswich, I asked my hosts if they would be good enough to drive me into Stowmarket. From there, with one change at Ely, I was able to catch an express on the Midland Line to St Pancras. I am afraid that the reception committee at King’s Cross had a long cold wait. They may be there still.’ He warmed his hands at the fire.

‘Rather a roundabout route,’ said Treschau. ‘I take it you had a reason.’

‘Of course.’

‘Which was?’

‘The reason was the presence in the village of a young man called Pagan. Luke Pagan. He is a policeman, stationed in this part of London, but he came originally from Bellingham.’

‘Then he had a reason for being there.’

‘Certainly. But no reason to take elaborate precautions to conceal his presence. He was lodged with his father, a close-mouthed Kulak, who was in church but said nothing about his son.’

‘You found that odd?’

‘Very odd. You would have imagined that the proud father would have had his son alongside, and talked about him to everyone who’d listen. But not so. And when I happened to mention the man to Sir George’s younger son he, too, affected to know nothing.’

‘If you didn’t see him and no one would talk about him, how did you know he was there?’

Silistreau smiled. It was a smile with a lot of ice in it. He said, ‘The young man made a mistake.’

‘Young men are apt to make mistakes,’ agreed Treschau. ‘What was this one?’

‘He spoke to one of the kitchen maids who recognised him and, naturally, mentioned it to everyone in the kitchen. What is news below stairs soon becomes news above stairs.’

‘I follow that,’ said Treschau. ‘What I cannot understand is why this young man should be so interested in you, and you in him.’

‘I am interested in him because he was in Newcastle when I arrived. He was hand in glove with the head of Port Security there. It is possible therefore – not certain, but quite possible – that he may have been shown the papers which were taken from me.’

‘Would he have understood them?’

‘Yes. He is a competent Russian speaker.’

There was a long pause, broken only when Treschau added a further piece of coal to the fire and the flames leaped up, glinting on his steel spectacles as he leaned forward.

He said, ‘Yes. That would be unfortunate.’

Although he had moved his base of operations to Poplar, Wensley had two reasons for maintaining contact with Leman Street. The first was that his laboriously compiled records, the fruit of his years of service in the East End, were filed there in heavy wooden cabinets, which would have been a labour to move and impossible to install in his new quarters at Poplar.

A second reason weighed with him even more heavily.

He had no desire to lose touch with Superintendent Joscelyne, who was his friend though his opposite in almost every respect. Wensley was a detective, who worked partly by instinct and rarely by the book. Joscelyne was a policeman, an excellent example of a regular officer, hidebound if you like, but totally dependable and uninfluenced by fear or favour. Working together they made a formidable pair.

When he arrived at Leman Street on the morning following a long, cold and fruitless wait at King’s Cross, Wensley was in no good temper. He found the Superintendent in a state of irritation bordering on outright fury.

‘We’ve got to do something about it,’ was his opening salvo. Wensley sat down without speaking and waited for the floodgates to open.

‘Last night,’ said Joscelyne, ‘or rather, in the early hours of this morning, a fire broke out in Osborne Street. You know it?’

‘Runs north from Whitechapel Road. Two of my men used to board there.’

‘Used to?’

‘I understand they were planning to get out some time this week. I advised them to come down to Poplar. I thought they’d be safer among a crowd of friendly sailors.’

‘And would the house they were using in Osborne Street have been, by any chance, number 15?’

‘I think it was. Yes. Why?’

‘Because that house was burned to the ground last night.’

‘Not accidentally, I assume.’

‘It could hardly have been more open and deliberate.’ The outrage in Joscelyne’s voice was clear. ‘When the brigade got there they found the owners of the house, a German Jew called Reuben and his wife, sitting on the pavement, unable to move, even though they were in some danger. They seemed to be paralysed, from fear or cold or both. In the end, when they had been lifted, almost bodily, and deposited in Whitechapel Hospital, they recovered enough to give some sort of account of what had happened. They occupy the ground floor, which is just a large kitchen, with a bedroom off it. The upper floors are usually let. At that moment, luckily, they were both empty. At about two in the morning they heard sounds of movement in the kitchen and came out to investigate. They found two men busy piling up tables and chairs against the door that led upstairs – which they’d bolted. The men were dressed in black, were masked and were completely terrifying. They gestured to the Reubens who cowered down on to a sofa and sat watching their household furniture being arranged as a bonfire. It seems that one of the most frightening things about the men was the unhurried and deliberate way they set about it all. Finally they soused the pile in some liquid they’d brought with them in a can – petrol, no doubt. When they were quite ready, they opened the street door, motioned to the Reubens to step outside, flung a lighted spill into the pile, closed the door and walked off up the street.’

Wensley listened impassively. Then he said, ‘So what do you make of it?’

‘Clearly they were after your two men. If they’d been upstairs asleep, they’d have been roasted.’

‘Yes. It’s lucky they’d moved.’

‘And I’ll tell you another piece of luck we had. Which was that none of our men were in or near Osborne Street at the time. As you know, they patrol in pairs. If they’d looked into the house whilst this was going on the likely result is that we should now have been two good men short.’

‘I thought that was what you meant,’ said Wensley.

In the silence that followed he and Joscelyne looked at each other. Neither of them seemed inclined to pursue a discussion that had proved sterile. Finally, as though he was answering the first comment that Joscelyne had made, he said, ‘There’s only one thing we can do. You know it and I know it – we’ve got to arm our men.’

‘And give them full permission to use those arms?’

‘Certainly. If they are faced by men who are themselves armed.’

‘Or men who they have a reasonable suspicion to think would be armed.’

Wensley thought about this and said, ‘It isn’t easy. But if I was giving them their instructions I’d keep it simple. I’d say, ‘If they shoot at you, you can shoot back.’

‘With a bullet already in you.’

‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate the difficulty,’ said Wensley. ‘In any event we’re talking about a situation that won’t arise whilst we’ve got our present Home Secretary.’

‘If someone would shoot at
him,
or blow
his
office up, he might be frightened into changing his mind.’

‘No,’ said Wensley. ‘Though he’s obstinate as a buffalo.’

‘And maddening,’ said Joscelyne, ‘as my grandmother who could never make her mind up whether she’d dropped a stitch in her knitting or not and used to unravel the whole piece to find out.’

Wensley grinned at this graphic description of the political mind at work. He said, ‘All right. Obstinate
and
maddening. I’ll grant you both of those. But there’s nothing in Winston’s early history to suggest he lacks courage. Rather the reverse. He seems to have invited danger, scampering around in the North-West Frontier, and insisting on joining in the fight against the dervishes when no one really wanted him. He seems to enjoy being anywhere where bullets are flying round.’

‘Which no doubt accounts,’ said Joscelyne gloomily, ‘for him turning up to get a front-seat view of the Sidney Street business. It attracted a lot of criticism in Parliament – which he seems to have minded as little as the bullets.’

‘Right,’ said Wensley. ‘That’s the Home Secretary we’ve got. And we can’t authorise the use of firearms without his consent. It’s a political decision.
But
– that doesn’t mean that the politicians have any say in the training of our men. You agree?’

‘Certainly not. Training’s our job.’

‘Very well. Is there any reason we shouldn’t pick the men we’d like to arm – say, two squads of twelve or fifteen men under a reliable sergeant – and put them through a course of weapon-training at Woolwich or the Tower?’

‘That’s certainly an idea,’ said Joscelyne.

‘The men will have to come from the uniform branch, you understand. We don’t want detectives going round with guns in their pockets. You’re not overstaffed. Are you going to be able to find that number of men?’

‘Not from “H” alone. But I’m sure “J” and “K” will co-operate when it’s put to them. And I’ll tell you something else. When I’m picking the squads I’ll choose as many men as I can get from the ones who were involved in the Sidney Street job.’

‘You mean they’d be happy to get their own back?’

‘No. For another reason altogether. I think that most of the men who were there would have liked to rush the house, regardless of the risk involved. They weren’t allowed to. Result, a lot of people, including those mean-minded characters who write to the papers, have started hinting that they were scared – and they can’t answer back. That’s not good for morale.’

On the days when it was not his turn to report at Leman Street, Joe had taken to sitting, in the late afternoon, in the embrasure of the window of the attic room he shared with Luke and keeping an eye on the kosher butcher’s shop which was one along from the corner of Cundy Street. Most of its visitors were Jewish housewives, who went in, gossiped interminably and came out with bulging shopping baskets. He had given up any real expectation of anything coming out of this surveillance, but Wensley had suggested it and it was an agreeable way of passing the time and fooling himself that he was working.

When he saw Treschau limping along the pavement and turning into the entrance of the shop he was so surprised that, for an appreciable time, he stayed anchored to his seat. However, his plans had been made. He got up, raced down two flights of stairs, out of the front door, across the street and into the porch of the house opposite. From there he could watch the shop, following Treschau if he went forward, getting still further back into the porch if he turned round. After ten minutes he began to wonder if the shop had a back door. No. Here he was, carrying a bulky parcel, wrapped in brown paper and corded. Which way was he going?

The Russian stood, for almost a minute, outside the shop as though he, himself, was uncertain. Then he turned to the right and went off down the street. Joe was not planning to tread on his heels. In spite of the casual way Treschau was conducting himself, Joe guessed that he had all his wits about him and eyes in the back of his head. When he had hobbled twenty yards along the pavement, Joe raced across the road junction, turned into Garvary Road, which ran parallel to Cundy Street and scudded down it, stopping at the corner. Treschau emerged from Cundy Street and moved steadily forward. Soon he was going to reach Prince Regent’s Lane and this was where things were going to become tricky.

It was natural to suppose that his man would turn left, since a right turn would simply bring him back to the river. But there were at least six streets crossing Prince Regent’s Lane, any one of which he might take before getting back to East Ham, Barking and civilisation. The important thing was to see which turning, if any, he did take. He therefore doubled back to Freemasons Road and went along it, regulating his pace to what he imagined would be that of his quarry and watching each of the side roads in turn. If his man did not appear at any of them, he would have to take the risky course of going down the last of the side roads and prospecting into the main road.

This he was finally forced to do, but without any success. Prince Regent’s Lane was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

Joe stopped to think. Treschau had not taken any of the left-hand turnings, nor had he gone straight on. There were three streets to the right, but as he suspected, and as he confirmed when he examined them, these were dead ends, leading only to marshland. They all ended in a rusty wire fence, easily passable. It was through one of these that Treschau must have gone.

Ahead of him stretched the barren waste of Plaistow Marshes, intersected by dykes and by streams which flowed, sluggishly for the most part, to the River Roding. The embanked edge of that river marked the eastern end of this desolate zone. The only signs of life in it were the brick chimneys of the Gas Light and Coke Company’s works away to the south, and to the east, the tiny group of Gallions Cottages. The few and rambling paths which crossed the area had been trampled into slush by the half-wild cattle which grazed in this forgotten corner of east London.

If Treschau had indeed gone that way, he could by now be crouched behind any of the dyke banks, looking back to see if he was being followed. The total disadvantage of his position was clear to Joe. The only tactic was retreat. He retraced his steps to Coolfin Road and found Luke there, who reported all quiet at Leman Street and had brought a veal and ham pie for their supper.

Joe explained what he had been doing and they spread the street map on the table and examined it as they ate.

‘Two things I’d like to know,’ said Joe. ‘Where was he making for and what was he doing with that parcel? He hadn’t got nothing with him when he went into the shop. So it must have been something he bought there.’

‘Meat, then, of some sort.’

‘What for? For a picnic? Or was he going to feed the birds on the marsh?’

‘There’s only one way of finding out,’ said Luke. ‘We keep our eyes on him. Next time we see him start out, we get ahead of him. Lie up on the edge of the marsh and see which way he goes.’