Ring of Terror (21 page)

Joe swore, loudly and violently. He was not afraid of being caught, confident that he could evade these heavy-footed townsmen and lie up until they got tired of looking for him or if necessary wait until nightfall. But the time element forbade such tactics. He had to get back and get back quick.

As a first step, appearing not to notice the watchers, he set out openly on the way home. After a short distance, this brought him below the brow of the intervening slope. As soon as he was out of sight he turned about and crawled, as fast as he could go, towards the river.

Unhappily, like many country boys, he had never learned to swim. His plan was to keep beside the river, under cover of its bank, until he reached the first bridge, which he knew led into a block of buildings south of the recreation ground. Unfortunately it was more than a mile upstream.

Nor was there an easy path beside the river. At some points he had to scramble through rocks and even descend into the river bed itself. Progress was slow. Pausing to listen, he could hear the men shouting. There were only two voices and he guessed that they had left one man to block the direct way back and that the other two were closing on the river. One of them was still some distance away, the other was much nearer.

Joe realised that the slowness of his advance was giving them an advantage. If he went on at his present rate both of them would be blocking the bridge before he got there. There was only one thing to do. He had to run for it.

He climbed up from the river bed and took a quick look. Sure enough one of his pursuers was not more than a hundred yards away. He recognised him at once from his height. It was Krustov. Young, tall and thin, the description had said. It had not revealed whether he was a sprinter.

The bridge was in sight, perhaps a hundred yards away. The finish was too close to be comfortable. He had reached and was almost across the plank bridge when Krustov arrived at the far end. Instead of charging across it, he steadied himself. Joe went down on hands and knees as the shot came. Then he pulled himself up and doubled down the street ahead.

This was disappointingly empty, with market gardens on one side and shuttered warehouses on the other. Joe had made fifty yards along it before the next shot came. Krustov must have been out of breath, because it went wide. At that moment a greengrocer’s cart, drawn by a pony and driven by a boy, came clattering round the corner at the far end of the street.

Joe stopped it by standing in the middle of the road. The driver, who had narrowly avoided running him down, looked upset. Joe said, ‘I’m a policeman. I’ll have to use your cart.’ The boy was clearly in two minds as to whether to allow Joe up, or to whip up his pony and drive away fast. Certainly Joe, after suffering in clothing and general appearance in the river bed, looked more like a tramp than a police officer.

It was Krustov who made up his mind for him. Having got his breath back, he fired again. At fifty yards it was good practice. The bullet hit the railing beside which they were standing and ricocheted off past the boy’s head.

This settled all doubts.

‘Ruskies eh?’ and ‘Chasing you, eh?’ and ‘Hop in quick.’

Joe was already up beside him. With a stamping of hooves, the pony turned the cart round and they made for the corner. No more shots came.

‘That was good, eh!’ said the boy. He had a cheerful freckled face and Joe judged that he was not more than fourteen years old.

‘That’s just the start,’ said Joe. ‘Now you drive me to the police station. As quick as you can and devil take anything that gets in our way.’

‘Which cop-shop?’ said the boy, who clearly regarded the whole matter as an unexpected but welcome break in an otherwise humdrum existence.

Joe had had time to think and had decided that his best course was to make directly for Poplar. It was past four o’clock. Even if Wensley had not yet got out of court, they would at least be close to the Customs House and the departure point of the
Viborg.
The boy needed no encouragement. It was a miracle that the only corpses they left behind them were one cat and one hen.

When they drew up in front of the police station, Joe jumped out and waved his thanks. The boy made no move to drive off. He felt there might be more to come.

Wensley had arrived five minutes before Joe. He listened to what he had to say and started to move before he had finished. As they reached the street he said, ‘The Customs Office and the departure pier are up the road. Quickest to run for it.’

‘Quicker still to drive,’ said Joe and indicated his chariot.

Wensley, who had no false notions of dignity, climbed up on to the driver’s bench. There was hardly room for the three of them. Joe, on the outside, clung to Wensley and hoped that providence, which had looked after him so far, would continue to do so.

When they reached the Customs House, the policeman on duty recognised Wensley and waved him in. He ran up the stairs, along the corridor and into the room labelled ‘Head of Port and Customs’. Mr Warburton, who held this double office, looked up in astonishment. He had never seen Wensley excited before. He tried to say something, but was ruthlessly cut short.

Had the
Viborg
sailed? Yes. Should be heading for Tilbury by now. Could he stop it? Mr Warburton might have said ‘How?’ but put a question which seemed to him to be even more cogent. He said, ‘Why?’

‘Because she’s got two badly wanted men on board.’

‘You can’t mean those two men we’ve been warned about?’

‘That’s just what I do mean,’ said Wensley. ‘Can you hold the ship?’

‘If I had a very good reason, I might ask the authorities at Tilbury to hold her. They could raise a question about quarantine. Something like that. But it’d have to be a convincing reason.’

He went to the door and shouted, ‘Mr Sleight.’

The man who came out of the office next door was immediately classified by Wensley as a red-tape merchant and an obstructionist. This was unfair. Sleight was, in fact, a hard-working subordinate who did his job without fuss.

He answered Wensley’s questions calmly.

Certainly the two passengers had been examined. Their tickets had been booked the day before and their luggage was already on board when they arrived only a few minutes before the ship left. It had been held for them. One of them was a Major Eberhardt, of the Royal Danish Army. He was on a six-month attachment to Woolwich to study recent advances in artillery technique. In particular, according to a letter he showed them, the use of shrapnel and the development of the recoil system. The other was Professor Kildebond of Arhus University, on temporary attachment to London University.

Papers? They both held Danish passports, stamped with entry visas six months earlier and temporary residence permits, issued when they entered the country. Yes, one of them was taller than the other, but this had not seemed a valid reason for questioning their credentials.

Wensley abandoned him and transferred his attention to Mr Warburton, who had succeeded by this time in contacting Tilbury on the telephone. It seemed that they were making difficulties about holding the
Viborg.
Particularly as she was a foreign ship.

It would need very high authority before they could interfere with her.

‘Only one thing for it,’ said Wensley. ‘We shall have to go to the top. Save time if I could use your telephone.’

‘My office and all that is in it is at your disposal,’ said Warburton handsomely.

At his third attempt, Wensley found Sr Melville Macnaghten at his club. When he understood what he was being asked to do, he said, ‘Winston’s at the Home Office. I’ve just been talking to his political secretary. He tells me that he’s heavily involved in the Ulster business. The only hope of getting him to move in our matter is to go and see him, which I’ll do right away. You’d better go back to your own office and stay by your telephone. I’ll telephone you as soon as I’ve got any news for you.’

So when Wensley reached his office, there was nothing for him to do but to wait for the telephone to ring. Joe, who had been hanging round uneasily, was able to fill in some time by organising a letter on Customs House paper for his charioteer, expatiating on the public service he had performed and excusing his abandonment of a vegetable delivery round. He had then visited the Seaman’s Cafe and treated himself to a large meal, after which, finding there was nothing useful he could do, he had taken himself back to his own pad. Luke, he knew, was on duty at Leman Street and unlikely to be back until late. This suited him. He had no intention of going to bed. He had other plans for that night and Luke’s absence would be helpful.

As dusk closed down, first softening the outlines of the sheds and derricks, then obscuring them, Wensley sat looking out of the window.

He understood the position that Churchill was in. It was less than a year ago that he had been faced with the riots of Tonypandy and Newport and had dealt with them firmly and successfully – whatever his opponents might say – by refusing to use troops and relying on an unarmed police force. He was unlikely to regard a few Russian scallywags as a more serious threat than a rioting and looting mob of miners and stevedores.

He had reached this point in his thinking when a squeal of brakes in the road outside announced the arrival of the new Daimler motor car which was the pride of Scotland Yard. From the window he saw Macnaghten descend and stop for a word with the police driver. Such a lack of urgency warned him to expect bad news and the look on Macnaghten’s face confirmed it.

He settled himself into the chair opposite the desk and said, ‘The answer is “no”. The Home Secretary will
not
ask his opposite number at the Admiralty to despatch a destroyer to stop and search the
Viborg.
He pointed out that to do so would be an insult to Denmark – could even be construed, if it took place outside her territorial waters, as an act of war. I couldn’t argue with that. It was what followed that annoyed me.’ He paused and then said, with a smile, ‘It annoyed me so much that I nearly threw my own position into the discard, by telling the Home Secretary a few home truths. I’m glad, on the whole, that I didn’t. What he said amounted to an accusation that we were panicking. It must be admitted that he had the facts at his fingertips.’

Macnaghten extended his own hand and ticked off the items in the indictment, a finger at a time.

‘The widow Triboff. No proof that the Russians were involved. Old women who lived alone often ran into trouble. The fire at the Reubens’ house. Was I aware – I wasn’t – that the insurance company had rejected their claim on the grounds that no one else had seen the alleged arsonists? Clearly they thought the whole thing was an insurance ramp. The feeble explosion at the Bethnal Green police station demonstrated one thing only. That the
émigrés
were running out of explosives, which might have been expected. They could have smuggled some in when they arrived, but were unlikely to have added to their stock since. After all, dynamite is not something you can buy over the counter. The Lockett robbery. Surely this was a logical development of what he had been saying. The minds of the Russians had turned from terrorism to simple robbery. Something which the police should be able to contain without guns in their pockets. And finally he was not prepared to yield to Abram Lockett’s threats. If he thought he could influence the other members of his committee – all of them sound Liberals – let him try. After which devastating speech for the prosecution he added a comment about you.’

‘Which was?’ said Wensley.

‘He said that when you remembered you were a policeman – as in the Clapham Common cases, which he had been following with interest – you did your job excellently. When you plunged into the waters of politics you got out of your depth.’

‘Looks as though I shall have to wade ashore, dunnit? Lot of work to do. First thing will be to find out how Heilmann and Katakin got hold of those convincing papers.’

‘Agreed. Any ideas?’

‘Ideas, plenty. Proof, none. I’ll put young Pagan on to that side of it. He’s got some useful contacts and it’s a help that he speaks Russian. The next thing will be to find out how their new escape route is going to function.’

‘Then you think they’ll be looking for a new way?’

‘Well, they can’t hardly use the old one, can they? Not now we know about it.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Though you have to hand it to them. It was an odds-on winner. All the escaper had to do was sign on as an assistant stoker on the
Dragon
and spread a good layer of soot over his face. He’d be carrying his new outfit in a sack. Wash and brush up at that cottage, put on any bits and pieces of disguise to match his new passport, put his old clothes in the sack for dumping in the river, be rowed to the dock steps and come up a different person.’

‘A sort of second birth,’ said Macnaghten. ‘Do you think Max Smoller and Peter the Painter went out that way?’

‘That may have been how they started.’

Macnaghten thought about it. The practical reactions of Wensley seemed to have restored some of his spirits. He said, ‘I’ll tell you something that may surprise you. I got the impression, a lot of the time, that Winston was arguing with himself. He’s got so much on his plate at the moment that he doesn’t
want
to think that this new threat is serious. Give him one good reason and he’ll change tack fast enough. He’s always maintained that consistency is the policy of small minds.’

Rabbi Werfel was not feeling easy.

Before coming to England he had suffered, and survived, one of the most savage of the Polish pogroms and he recognised the signs of trouble looming. Walking round into Brownsong Court that morning he had observed that the little shops on the far side of Brownsong Passage had their shutters closed. On the nearside, the Solomon sweat-shop had the week before shut down one of its two workrooms and dismissed the male staff. Now he saw that there was a notice on the door advising the girls who worked in the other room that business was suspended. ‘For a short time’, said the notice. He had a premonition that it would be a very long time. He could see from the faces of the few passers-by that they feared the same.