Hide My Eyes

Chapter 2 BIG GAME-1

Chapter 2

BIG GAMEJ

UST about eight months after the incident which the newspapers had christened ‘The Goff Place Mystery’ had made a nine days’ wonder in the Press and the Police had endured a great deal of unconstructive criticism with their usual gloomy stoicism, Mr. Albert Campion closed the door of Chief Superintendent Yeo’s room and walked up two flights of stairs to tap on one which belonged to the newest Superintendent, Charles Luke.

Mr. Campion was a tall thin man in his early fifties, with fair hair, a pale face and large spectacles, who had cultivated the gentle art of unobtrusiveness until even his worst enemies were apt to overlook him until it was too late. He was known to a great many people but few were absolutely certain about what it was he actually did with his life. In his youth he had often been described as ‘the young man come about the trouble’, and nowadays he was liable to mention deferentially that he feared he was becoming ‘the old one come with it’, but now, as then, he was careful never to permit his status to be too accurately defined.

It was certainly true that he had a private practice but also a fact that he and the present Assistant Commissioner, Crime, Mr. Stanislaus Oates, had been hunting companions in the days when Oates was an Inspector C.I.D. Since then Yeo, who was following Oates’s footsteps, and many other eminent senior men in the service were content to consider him a friend, an expert witness and, at times, a very valuable guide into little known territory.

At the moment he was not very happy. Old friendship has a way of making demands on a man which would be considered unreasonable by the standards of frank enmity. On arriving at Yeo’s office in response to an urgent message it had emerged after a considerable display of bush beating that what ‘the Guv’nor’ really required from his old chum was a promise that he would ‘drop a hint’ to Charlie Luke.

Mr. Campion, who was very fond of Yeo and even fonder of Charles Luke, whom they both felt to be the most interesting personality the C.I.D. had produced in a decade, found the assignment suspect in the extreme. In the first place Yeo was more than capable of dealing himself with any sort of problem however delicate, and in the second, Luke was Yeo’s own protégé and white hope for the future, the son of his old colleague and an officer over whose career he had watched for twenty years. If Yeo needed help in hint dropping to Luke Mr. Campion felt the situation must be out of hand. Moreover, in his experience, getting a word in edgeways with Luke was a major operation on its own account at the best of times, let alone at the moment when quite a lot appeared to have been said already.

He knocked at the green door and was admitted by a clerk who withdrew as the Superintendent came across the room, hand outstretched.

Mr. Campion thought he had never seen the man in such tremendous form. Luke was a magnificent specimen who looked a little less than his six feet because of the weight of his muscles. He had a live, dark face under black hair which curled tightly to his scalp, nervous energy radiated from him and his narrow eyes under peaked brows were shrewd and amused.

“Hello! Just the man I was hoping to see!” he said with disconcerting enthusiasm. “Come in. I was wondering if I could possibly get hold of you to ask you to drop a hint to the Old Man for me. He thinks I’m round the bend.”

Mr. Campion knew Yeo did, on the very best authority. However he saw no point in mentioning it and Luke gave him little opportunity. His handshake was a minor ordeal and he got his visitor settled in the arm-chair before the desk with the alarming purposefulness of one who perceives a heaven-sent audience.

“I’m on to something pretty hot,” he announced without preamble. “I’m certain of it but at the moment its just a little bit on the vague side.”

“That’s a quality which has disadvantages,” murmured Mr. Campion, who knew what they were rather better than most people. “Authority doesn’t warm to the indefinite.”

“It’s the new rank, I know that.” Luke spoke bluntly. “A Chief can have ideas and a mere D.D.I, is permitted to have a hunch. But a Super is paid to keep his feet on the carpet, his seat on his chair and his head should be a box marked ‘Members Only’. I know that better than anybody and in the ordinary way I believe in it. But just now I really have stumbled on a trail. This is one of my ‘sixth-sense-specials’. I’ve had them all my life. Look, Campion, since you’re here, take a look at this, will you?”

He turned to a chart which hung on the wall behind him and Mr. Campion, who had heard about it already from Yeo, saw that it was a large-scale street map of a part of the Metropolitan Police District in west London where Charlie Luke had served as a Detective Divisional Inspector for several adventurous years. The thin man remembered most of the areas as a labyrinth of Victorian middle-class stucco which had degenerated with the wars into alarming slums and was now on the upgrade once more, but the portion shown here was new to him. It was a circle, some quarter mile across, in the north of the district and sported a crop of coloured flags as on a battle map. The centre of the round was an irregular patch, coloured green to indicate an open space, which lay in the angle made by the junction of two traffic ways, Edge Street running south to the Park and the long Barrow Road going west. He leaned forward to read the large print across the space.

“Garden Green,” he said aloud. “I don’t know it, I’m afraid. I thought it was Goff’s Place you were worrying about.”

Luke c****d an eye at him.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You had a word with the Guv on the way up. Did he tell you that I’d got a delusion that Jack Havoc or the Reddingdale Butcher had come back to haunt me because I didn’t bring either of them to trial?”

“No.” Mr. Campion hoped sincerely that he was lying in a good cause. “I merely gathered you were inclined to link three or four of the unsolved cases of the last three years and to attribute them to the same unknown man.”

“Huh,” said Luke. “So I am.” He perched himself on the edge of the desk and looked, as Campion had so often seen him, like some huge cat, lithe and intent. “Goff’s Place and the corpse who went by ’bus. Put everything you’ve ever heard about that business out of your mind and listen to me.”

It was one of Charlie Luke’s more engaging peculiarities that he amplified all his stories with a remarkable pantomimic sideshow which he gave all the time he was talking. He drew diagrams in the air with his long hands and made portraits of his characters with his own face. Mr. Campion was not at all surprised therefore when he hunched himself, drew his lips over his teeth to suggest age and altered the shape of his nose by clapping his fist over it.

“Poor old Lew,” he said. “A decent, straight little chap with more patience than sense until the end of it was reached of course, when he was firm as a moneylender has to be. He had a pawn shop in Deban Street and when he shut it in the evening he used to nip upstairs to his office and get out his ledgers on the usury lark. His interest was stiff but not over the odds and he’d traded there for years without a complaint.” He paused and fixed his visitor with a baleful eye. “Someone took him for a ride and made a mess of his office first. There was blood all over the floor, at least half a dozen vital books were missing and the trail led down the stairs at the back to a door which opened into Goff’s Place and no one has seen little Lew since. There was a lot of excitement at first but since there was no corpse to show, it petered out.”

Mr. Campion nodded. “I remember it,” he said, “It was a very wet night and nobody noticed that it was curious that a country ’bus should have been waiting in the yard at a time when there was no performance on at the Duke of Grafton’s. The police decided the body must have been taken away in the ’bus.”

“The Police had to decide something,” said Luke bitterly. “We had to make up our minds if we were going or coming for one thing. But it must have been done that way otherwise we should have been able to trace the blessed vehicle. We advertised all over the home counties, every police force was alerted, we inspected close on seven hundred garages. Old Lew must have gone in the ’bus, but in that case what was the explanation of the two old dears who were already sitting in it? That was the item which shook me. Who were they? What happened to them? Why did they keep silent and how sound were they sleeping?”

Mr. Campion’s pale eyes grew thoughtful behind his spectacles. It was very difficult not to be moved by Luke’s forceful imagination which re-created a picture grown faint in his mind.

“Ah yes,” he said at last. “The old man with the round beard and the old lady with the beads in her bonnet who were dozing on the front seat. Some witness described them, I fancy.”

“We had five,” Luke said. “Five people came forward to swear that they’d glanced into Goff’s Place that night at varying times between nine-forty and ten-five and had seen the ’bus waiting there. They all remembered the old folk and hardly seem to have noticed anything else, let alone the number or the colour of the coach. Even the waiter who passed the mouth of the yard when the ’bus driver was actually climbing into his seat didn’t glance at him twice but could paint a picture of the passengers in oils. He was the chap who swore he’d seen them before.”

“Had he, by George? That must have been useful!” The thin man was puzzled. “Extraordinary you got no further. Or wasn’t it?” he added as Luke’s face grew darker.

“I thought so.” The new Superintendent was inclined to be off-hand. “The chap wasn’t specific. He thought he’d seen them in Edge Street and he was certain it was through glass. He reckoned they must have been sitting in a tea shop and he’d seen them through the window as he passed by.” He hesitated and after a moment’s indecision remarkably unlike him turned and nodded towards the chart on the wall. “Those three yellow flags mark the only eating places in the area where he could have done that.”

Mr. Campion’s brows rose. He had been warned that Luke was catching at straws.

“Hardly conclusive,” he ventured.

Luke sniffed. “Hardly there at all,” he conceded handsomely. “I warn you, my evidence gets thinner still as I go on. That’s one reason why the Old Man is so windy. That blue flag on the corner there marks the branch of Cuppages the cheap outfitters where this was bought in a sale.” He leant over the desk, dragged open a drawer and drew out a thick brown envelope.

Mr. Campion watched him while he took out the glove it contained. It was cut for a man’s left hand in imitation hogskin and was nearly new. Luke’s narrow eyes met Mr. Campion’s squarely.

“This is the glove left behind in the Church Row shooting case.”

“Oh dear!” Mr. Campion’s protest was so completely spontaneous and like himself that his friend had the grace to colour.

“All right.” Luke threw the exhibit on the brass tray of a pair of letter scales which he kept on the desk top and it lay there, limp and unimpressive, kept in the air by the small column of weights on the other side. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I only point out that this glove left behind by the unknown gunman who shot his way out of a house in Church Row when he discovered that there were more people in the building than the woman householder, was bought in Cuppages on that corner.”

“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t dream of arguing with you,” Mr. Campion made it clear that he was not a man who argued at all. “But I would point out that the Church Row shooting happened quite three years ago.”