The Mysterious Commission (12 page)

‘Glory, glory!’ Keybird then said.

These were surprising words. Honeybath still felt a certain antipathy towards Keybird; the man had been too abrupt with him in pursuance of his own vision of the affair. And he didn’t now suppose it to be a hitherto unsuspected connoisseurship lurking in him that had prompted the exclamation. Had it been educed, nevertheless, from a committee consisting of Lord Clark and the ghosts of the late Bernard Berenson, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, he could scarcely have felt more overwhelmed for the moment. And it was for no better reason – so strange are the vagaries of the human heart – than that he had at length, in some mysterious fashion, gained merit with this common thief-catcher.

‘Do you mean,’ he asked, ‘that it’s at all likely to answer your purposes?’

‘
Likely
to? Good God, sir, it’s the whole thing! This is Crumble. Sammy Crumble himself. It couldn’t be anybody else. What a fool he was to get himself under such an eye as yours! An utterly nondescript type – and I suppose he’s come to gamble on the fact.’

‘Peach is really somebody called Crumble, who is already known to the police?’

‘Certainly he is. And all we have to do now is to pick him up.’

‘Which is an entirely easy task?’ Honeybath, although still a little overcome by the unexpected degree of his success, managed to import a mild scepticism into this inquiry.

‘Easy? Why–’ Keybird checked himself in what was clearly to have been a brusque retort. ‘Look, sir, have you a few hours to spare?’

‘Certainly I have.’

‘And you wouldn’t mind cutting short another night’s sleep?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Then I’ll show you.’

It had been designed, Honeybath was later to conclude, as a reward for good conduct, as the kind of treat given to a child who has been unexpectedly well-behaved and helpful. At the time, however, it was his thought that he was being kept an eye on. He hadn’t quite recovered from being a suspected criminal. Perhaps he was still a suspected criminal. It was this that had made him – by way of showing the flag – so roundly declare that, even at the end of a day’s stretching and unusual professional labour, he was fit for anything that was on. And it was thus that he came to spend a long night at the very heart of the search for Sammy Crumble.

It was an absurd name. It was even more absurd to be called Crumble than to be called Peach. Perhaps the respectable and disagreeable confidential person who had lured him into his adventure was no more a Crumble than a Peach; perhaps Crumble was merely the particular alias under which one who was really a Smith or a Brown happened to be known to the police. Not that it mattered very much. Smith or Brown or Peach or Crumble, Scotland Yard was sure that they could get him.

There was nothing particularly spectacular about the start of the operation. Keybird picked up the bank manager’s telephone, dialled a number, asked for an extension, and then said ‘Keybird, locations, priority Crumble S’. He listened for a moment, said ‘Confirm Crumble S’ and put the instrument down again.

‘That will take half an hour,’ he remarked apologetically to Honeybath. ‘So shall we just check up on the day’s work here?’

Honeybath had always vaguely supposed that his bank – this particular Chelsea branch of it, that was to say – must extend in dimensions not immediately apparent to a customer. It did so, he now discovered, in the main on a subterranean level. There was no ramification beneath his studio, since that possessed its own cellarage. But this cellarage had long since been boarded over and sealed off from the studio in the interest of housing some Tartarean electrical device the existence of which Honeybath had known nothing about. Here was the reason for the thieves having had to break through his floor. They had then, working in a constricted space, been obliged to dig down a further six feet, and so arrive at a level below those basement regions of the bank which spread extensively at the rear of the premises. Even then, there had still been much tunnelling to do, since there were four consecutive strong-rooms which could be broken into only from below. The entire operation, it seemed to Honeybath, must have been almost as highly organized as the operation going forward in the same region now.

For these industrious persons were certainly not bank staff. Nor were they – although it was what their white overalls and caps suggested – a high-powered research unit in a hospital. Perhaps they should be called forensic scientists, although it was simpler to think of them just as a new sort of policemen on the job. The evidences of what they were up against stood ranged all around them: two cavernous safes agape through doors so massive as to suggest the interior of an obsolete battleship, and which were probably equally obsolete themselves; row upon row of steel safe-deposit boxes every one of which had been cut open with the identical ruthless efficiency. On an otherwise empty table stood a small, neat pile of £5 notes. Honeybath supposed this to represent the total booty recovered so far. Or perhaps it had been deliberately left there by the thieves as an ironically conceived
pourboire
for all these toiling detectives.

‘Are these fellows,’ Honeybath asked, ‘hunting for that signature?’

‘Signature?’ Keybird seemed at sea.

‘I think one of your colleagues said that nobody can be physically present in a given place without leaving–’

‘Ah, yes! Well, that’s certainly what’s going forward. And you notice that they pretty well bring their own mobile labs with them. Much more efficient than caning off samples of everything under the sun to our headquarters.’

‘And what sort of form is the signature likely to take? Cigarette-ends disclosing the presence of rare tobaccos?’

‘Not exactly.’ Keybird laughed genially, as if in high good humour. ‘I’m afraid fiction has made them rather chary of dropping anything of that kind. But smoke, now, is another matter. You wouldn’t believe it, but many of them chain-smoke while on the job. The atmosphere can end up like cotton wool; you collect the stuff, shove it in a bottle or straight into a test-tube, and apply a technique of micro-analysis. Most informative at times that can be. Then again, the heat built up by their apparatus is tremendous, and they sweat like pigs. Swab themselves down, often, with a bit of cotton waste, and then chuck it away. A mistake – as are some other not very refined personal habits. Human secretions and excretions–’

‘Most interesting,’ Honeybath said. He could only conjecture that this fantastic talk was designed to make a fool of him. ‘But I’d suppose other forms of investigation to be more promising. Do particular gangs going after this sort of thing have their regular and identifiable techniques?’

‘Good question.’ It was to be presumed that Detective Superintendent Keybird was in the habit of conducting seminars at police colleges. ‘They certainly do, although they’re smart enough to try to obliterate the traces of it. But their equipment is a limiting factor. They can’t always be replacing it, and close analysis can get us quite some way. The kind of tool that cut into those boxes’ – and Keybird pointed to the wall – ‘well, we are often able to say where it was manufactured, to whom it was first sold, and on what occasion it was first employed on a job like this. Wonderful, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Oh, undoubtedly. But has any progress actually yet been achieved by these methods in this particular case?’ It seemed to Honeybath that this was a fair question.

‘Well, no – you have to give them time. Or they would have to be given time if I wasn’t enjoying the good fortune of your co-operation, sir.’ Keybird lowered his voice. ‘So let’s leave them to it,’ he murmured. ‘We’ve better things to do than hang around a bunch of boffins.’

This unexpected remark gratified Honeybath as much as it surprised him. Art, he felt, was carrying the day over science. His production of an identifiable Sammy Crumble had seen to that.

They drove through London – not, this time, to the accompaniment of any wailing of sirens, but making a fair speed, all the same. Within ten minutes they had reached Whitehall and the unobtrusive turn off Whitehall up which all well-informed tourists glance with quite as much interest as, a little farther north, they glance in the other direction up Downing Street. Honeybath couldn’t recall having been at school with the Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. But he had no doubt that, if he met the chap, they would prove to be approximately out of the same stable. So Honeybath (unlike some visitors) felt tolerably comfortable as he was driven into New Scotland Yard. It was so pervasively lit up that he wondered whether any of its inhabitants ever went home for the night. But probably they worked in shifts. There seemed to be a great many policemen in the world. There had been any number of them in that single small bank.

‘We’ll go right up,’ Keybird said – and added mysteriously: ‘It ought to be mounted by now.’

More policemen – and policewomen too. They sat in rows before switchboards in an enormous room, and as Honeybath was led past he could hear them saying into microphones things like ‘Over’ and ‘Message timed at twenty-two hours twenty’. In fact it was so like something on television that a dispassionate spectator would have had to pronounce the spectacle somewhat banal in effect. But Honeybath was not exactly in the condition of such a spectator. He had recently been through strange and unnerving experiences, in the course of which he would on several occasions have been very glad to know that even the humblest officer of the law was at his call in case of need. Now he had been invited, through some caprice, as it seemed, of Detective Superintendent Keybird, to participate in what he realized was to be a man-hunt. His presence, it was true, could not be other than slightly otiose; he was to be like one of those devoted but dismounted persons who pant after a pack of foxhounds on foot, or stand peering over hedges in the hope of some distant prospect of a kill. But here he was, and he felt the first excitement of the chase.

There was another room. It was smaller, but still very large. It was also lofty – so lofty that it must have been almost a cube. Little furniture was visible: not much more than a table and a few upright chairs facing a huge and seemingly blank wall, hovering in shadow beyond some source of subdued light. But as Honeybath and his formidable
cicerone
entered, the wall itself lit up. What was revealed as occupying its whole extent was a map of London. This had the appearance of being etched upon a single sheet of glass or of some glass-like substance. Keybird motioned his guest to a chair, and himself sat down before the table. He gathered writing-materials to his hand.

‘Begin, please,’ Keybird said quietly and apparently to nobody in particular. And to Honeybath he said: ‘Computerized stuff, this. But it’s really very simple. Our friend’s known contacts. And then
their
known contacts, sifted and selected in the light of certain obvious criteria. Not useful to have half London winking at us from the start.’

On the map a tiny light flashed on. It did, in fact, wink or blink – but this seemingly only to announce its own arrival with a kind of bow. Almost at once it settled down to a small bright glow.

‘Bethnal Green,’ a matter-of-fact (if somewhat Staff College) voice said somewhere in air – and gave an address and a National Grid reading. ‘Crumble’s father, pawnbroker, one unsuccessful prosecution for receiving 1967, one unsuccessful prosecution for dishonest handling 1968, still therefore in business 1973.’

‘The stupid old machine begins with next of kin,’ Keybird murmured indulgently. ‘I’ll bet it would obstinately go on doing so, even if it weren’t programmed that way. They develop a will of their own you know. But Sammy won’t be
there
just at the moment – not even if he believes he’s safe as houses. Do you know what the next will be? An old auntie, if I know anything about it. Wager you a bottle of whisky.’

‘Done,’ Honeybath said rashly.

‘Bethnal Green.’ The voice gave an address again. ‘Sara Crumble, aunt, National Retirement Pension and Supplementary Benefit.’

‘Superannuated whore,’ Keybird said comfortably but on a frankly speculative note. ‘Being supported through a dishonourable old age by a grateful nation.’

‘Good luck to her.’ Honeybath became aware that he was capable of a certain intermittent liking for Keybird. ‘Don’t you think he may be with auntie?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Keybird paused, and a third light blinked into view. ‘Hullo, Hampstead! Switch to high life. Perhaps we’ll take a run out to Hampstead.’

‘Geoffrey de Bailhache,’ the voice was saying. ‘Known to the police since 1953, knighted 1960–’

‘Good God!’ Honeybath exclaimed. ‘I’ve painted him.’

‘Be quiet,’ Keybird said – quite politely. He was making a note. ‘Now, what’s this? Ah, back to Whitechapel. Nicer people, on the whole. But not invariably respecters of the law. I expect it’s Finnegan. And so it is. Goes round with his pals in three pink Mercedeses. Remarkable chap.’

This weird process continued for half an hour, by which time the big map was beginning to look like the Milky Way. And suddenly Keybird called a halt.

‘As many as we can reckon to raid simultaneously,’ he said. ‘We don’t want these worthies to have much opportunity of ringing round to one another. A magistrate’s been signing search warrants like mad all the time. Wonderful thing, English jurisprudence. My own fancy’s for that one right down by the river. Useful derelict warehouse bang next door. So I’ll wager–’

‘No takers,’ Honeybath said.

They were in a different car. Honeybath had glimpsed enough of it to judge it capable, on demand, of a wicked turn of speed. He had an alarmed vision of it as touching, later on during this unbelievable night, something quite phenomenal on the M4. But that would be all in the game. He was going to see this damned thing through. Even although he had to judge it not improbable that gentlemen who go about in pink Mercedes cars carry automatic weapons on their peregrinations as a matter of course.

Detective Superintendent Keybird’s only weapon appeared to be a watch. With perhaps unnecessary drama, Honeybath thought of General Gordon, a light cane in his hand, confronting the Madhi’s murderous horde in the Soudan. To remove his mind from this sort of thing, he endeavoured to engage Keybird in conversation.