The Dark Side of the Street
Hoffa climbed up and peered inside. The compartment was about eight feet by three with a mattress as its base and he nodded briefly. ‘How long?’
‘Six hours,’ the driver said. ‘No light, I’m afraid, and you can’t smoke, but there’s coffee in the thermos and some sandwiches in a biscuit tin. Best I can do.’
‘Can I ask you where we’re going?’
The driver shook his head, face impassive. ‘Not in the contract, that one.’
‘All right,’ Hoffa said. ‘Let’s get rolling.’
He went through the hatch head-first and as he turned to face the light, the cover clanged into place, plunging him into darkness. Panic moved inside him and his throat went dry and then the tanker started to roll forward and the mood passed. He lay back on the mattress, head pillowed on his hands and after a while his eyes closed and he slept.
At that precise moment some ten miles away, the man who had called himself Smith braked to a halt in the High Street of the first village he came to, went into a public telephone box and dialled a London number.
A woman answered him, her voice cool and impersonal. ‘Worldwide Exports Ltd.’
‘Simon Vaughan speaking from the West Country.’
The voice didn’t change. ‘Nice to hear from you. How are things down there?’
‘Couldn’t be better. Our client’s on his way. Anything on the news yet?’
‘Not a murmur.’
‘The lull before the storm. You’ll find the goods in a steamer trunk at Price’s Furniture Repository, Pimlico, in the name of Henry Walker. The receipt’s in the spine of an old Salvation Army Bible amongst his gear at his mother’s place in Kentish Town. I shouldn’t think a nice young lady welfare officer would have too much trouble in getting that out of her.’
‘I’ll handle it myself.’
‘I wouldn’t waste too much time. It’s almost five o’clock. The furniture repository probably closes at six. Might be an idea to give them a ring, just to make sure they’ll stay open for you.’
‘Leave it to me. You’ve done well. He’ll be pleased.’
‘Anything to oblige, old girl, that’s me.’
Vaughan replaced the receiver and lit a cigarette, a slight far-away look in his eyes. ‘Oh, what I’d like to do to you, sweetie,’ he murmured softly and as he returned to the car, there was a smile on his face.
Hoffa came awake slowly and lay staring through the heavy darkness, trying to work out where he was and then he remembered and pushed himself up on one elbow. According to the luminous dial on his watch it was a quarter past ten which meant they had been on the go for a little over five hours. Not much longer to wait and he lay back again, head pillowed on his hands, thinking of many things, but in particular of how he was going to start to live again – really live, in some place of warmth and light where the sun always shone and every woman was beautiful.
He was jerked out of his reverie as the tanker braked and started to slow. It rolled to a halt, but the engine wasn’t turned off. The hatch opened and the driver’s face appeared, a pale mask against the night sky.
‘Out you get!’
It was a fine night with stars strung away to the horizon, but there was no moon. Hoffa stood at the side of the road stretching to ease his cramped limbs as the driver dropped the hatch back into place.
‘What now?’
‘You’ll find a track leading up the mountain on the other side of the road. Wait there. Someone will pick you up.’
He was inside the cab before Hoffa could reply, there was a hiss of air as he released the brake and the tanker rolled away into the night. Hoffa watched the red tail lights fade into darkness, then picked up his rucksack and moved across the road.
He found the track without any difficulty and stood there peering into the darkness, wondering what to do next. The voice, when it came, made him start in alarm because of its very unexpectedness.
‘Is there anywhere in particular you’d like me to take you?’
It was a woman who had spoken – a woman with a pronounced Yorkshire accent and he peered forward trying to see her as he replied, ‘Babylon.’
‘Too far for me, but I can take you part of the way.’
She moved close, her face a pale blur in the darkness, then turned without another word and walked away. Hoffa followed her, the loose stones of the track rattling under his feet. In spite of his long sleep, he was tired. It had, after all, been quite a day and somewhere up ahead there had to be food and a bed.
They walked for perhaps half a mile, climbing all the time and he was aware of hills on either side of them and the cold chill in the wind and then the track turned a shoulder and below in a hollow beside a stream was a farmhouse, a light in the downstairs window.
A dog barked hollowly as she pushed open a five-barred gate and led the way across the cobbled yard. As they approached the front door, it opened suddenly and a man stood there framed against the light, a shotgun in his hands.
‘You found him then, Molly?’
For the first time Hoffa had a clear view of the girl and realised with a sense of surprise, that she couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty years of age with haunted eyes and a look that said she hadn’t smiled in a long time.
‘Will you want me for anything more tonight?’ she said in a strange dead voice.
‘Nay, lass, off you go to bed and look in on your mother. She’s been asking for you.’
The girl slipped past him and he leaned a shotgun against the wall and came forward, hand outstretched. ‘A real pleasure, Mr Hoffa. I’m Sam Crowther.’
‘So you know who I am?’ Hoffa said.
‘They’ve been talking about nowt else on the radio all night.’
‘Any chance of finding out where I am?’
Crowther chuckled. ‘Three hundred and fifty miles from where you started off. They won’t be looking for you round here, you may be certain of that.’
‘Which is something, I supppose,’ Hoffa said. ‘What happens now? Do we move into Phase Two yet?’
‘I had a telephone call from London no more than an hour ago. Everything went as smooth as silk. You’ll have no worries from now on, Mr Hoffa.’ He turned and called over his shoulder, ‘Billy – where are you, Billy? Let’s be having you.’
The man who appeared in the doorway was a giant. At least six feet four in height, he had the shoulders and arms of an ape and a great lantern jaw. He grinned foolishly, a dribble of saliva oozing from the corner of his mouth as he shambled into the yard and Crowther clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Good lad, Billy, let’s get moving. There’s work to be done.’ He turned and smiled. ‘This way, Mr Hoffa.’
He led the way across the yard, Hoffa at his heels, Billy bringing up the rear and opened a gate leading into a small courtyard. The only thing it seemed to contain was an old well surrounded by a circular brick wall about three feet high.
Hoffa took a step forward. ‘Now what?’
His reply was a single stunning blow from the rear delivered with such enormous power that his spine snapped like a rotten stick.
He lay there writhing on the ground and Crowther stirred him with the toe of his boot. ‘In he goes, Billy.’
Hoffa was still alive as he went headfirst into the well. His body bounced from the brickwork twice on the way down, but he could feel no pain. Strangely enough, his last conscious thought was that Hagen had been right. It had been his funeral after all and then the cold waters closed over him and he plunged into darkness.
2
Cops and Robbers
When the noon whistle blew a steady stream of workers began to emerge from Lonsdale Metals. In the café opposite the main gates Paul Chavasse got to his feet, folded his newspaper and went outside. It was precisely this busy period that he had been waiting for and he crossed the road quickly.
The main entrance itself was blocked by a swing bar which was not raised until any outgoing vehicle had been checked by the uniformed guard, but the workers used a side gate and crowded through it slowly to a chorus of ribald comments and good humoured laughter.
Undistinguishable from the rest of them in brown overalls and tweed cap, Chavasse plunged into the crowd, working against the stream. He met with some good natured abuse as he forced his way through, but a moment later he was inside the gate. He moved through the crowd, glancing quickly through the window of the gatehouse on his left, noting the three uniformed security guards at the table, coffee and sandwiches spread before them, an Alsatian squatting in the corner.
The workers were still moving towards the gate in a steady stream and Chavasse passed through them quickly, crossed the yard to the main block and entered the basement garage. He had spent the previous night poring over the plans S2 had provided until the layout of the building was so impressed on his mind that he was able to move with perfect confidence.
There were still one or two mechanics about, but he ignored them, mounted the ramp, walked behind the line of waiting vehicles parked in the loading bay and pressed the button for the service lift. A moment later he was on his way to the third floor.
It was strangely quiet when he stepped out and he paused, listening, before moving along the corridor. The door to the wages office was on the third from the end and marked Private. He glanced at it briefly in passing, turned the corner and opened a door which carried the sign Fire Exit. Concrete stairs dropped into a dark well beneath him and on the wall to his left he found what he was looking for – a battery of fuse boxes.
Each box was numbered neatly in white paint. He pushed the handle on number ten into the off position and returned to the corridor.
He knocked on the door of the wages office and waited. This was the crucial moment. According to his information, the staff went to lunch between noon and one o’clock leaving only the chief cashier on duty, but nothing was certain in this life – he had learned that if nothing else in seven years of working for the Bureau and there were bound to be days when someone or other decided to have sandwiches instead of going out. Two he could handle – any more than that and he was in trouble. Not that it mattered – it all came down to the same thing in the end and he smiled wryly. On the other hand it might be amusing to see just how far he could go.
A spyhole flicked open in front of him and he caught the glint of an eye.
‘Mr Crabtree?’ Chavasse said. ‘I’m from Maintenance. There’s been a partial power failure on this floor and I’m checking each office to find the cause. Is everything all right here, sir?’
‘Just a moment.’ The cover of the spyhole dropped into place. A moment later there was the rattle of a chain, the door opened and a small white haired man peered out. ‘The lights don’t seem to be working at all. You’d better come in.’
Chavasse stepped inside, noting in that first quick moment that they were alone and Crabtree busied himself in locking and chaining the door again. He was perhaps sixty and wore neat gold-rimmed spectacles. When he turned and found the muzzle of a .38 automatic staring him in the face, his eyes widened in horror, his shoulders sagging so that he seemed to shrink and become visibly smaller.
Chavasse stifled a pang of remorse and tapped him gently on the cheek with the barrel of the automatic. ‘Do as you’re told and you’ll come out of this in one piece – understand?’ Crabtree nodded dumbly and Chavasse produced a pair of handcuffs from a pocket in his overalls and gestured to a chair. ‘Sit down and put your hands behind you.’
He handcuffed Crabtree quickly, secured his ankles with a length of cord and squatted in front of him. ‘Comfortable?’
The cashier seemed to have made a remarkable recovery and smiled thinly. ‘Relatively.’
Chavasse warmed to him. ‘Your wage bill here runs you between forty and fifty thousand pounds depending on the amount of overtime worked. What’s the figure this week?’
‘Forty-five thousand,’ Crabtree replied without the slightest hesitation. ‘Or to put it another way, just over half a ton dead weight. Somehow I don’t think you’re going to get very far.’
Chavasse grinned. ‘We’ll see, shall we?’
There was money everywhere, some of it stacked in neat bundles as it had come from the bank, a large amount already made up into wage packets in wooden trays. The strongroom door stood open and inside he found a trolley with canvas sides containing several large money bags which, from their weight, held silver and copper. He removed the bags quickly, wheeled the trolley into the office and pushed it along the line of desks, sweeping in bundles of banknotes and wage packets together. Crabtree was right – it added up to quite a load yet it took him no more than three minutes to clear the lot.
He pushed the trolley to the door and Crabtree said, ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but we do a great deal of work for the RAF here so our security system’s rather special.’
‘I got in, didn’t I?’
‘But not while you were pushing half a ton of banknotes in front of you and it’s impossible for any vehicle to get through that gate until it’s been thoroughly checked. Something of a problem, I should have thought.’
‘Sorry I haven’t time to discuss it now,’ Chavasse said. ‘But don’t fail to buy an evening paper. They’ve promised to print the solution for me.’
He produced a large piece of sticking plaster and pasted it over the cashier’s mouth before he could reply. ‘Can you breathe all right?’ Crabtree nodded, something strangely like regret in his eyes, and Chavasse grinned. ‘It’s been fun. Somehow I don’t think you’ll be on your own for long.’
The door closed behind him with a click and Crabtree sat there in the silence, waiting, feeling more alone than at any other time in his life. It seemed an age before he heard heavy feet pounding along the corridor and the anxious knocking started on the door.
The previous Wednesday when it all started, was a morning of bright sunshine and Chavasse had chosen to walk through the park on his way to Bureau headquarters. Life, for an intelligence agent, is a strange and rather haphazard existence compounded of short, often violent, periods of service in the field followed by months of comparative inactivity, often spent in routine anti-espionage investigations or administration.
For almost half a year Chavasse had clocked in each morning as ordered, to sit behind a desk in a converted attic in the old house in St John’s Wood to spend the day sifting through reports from field sections in all parts of the globe – demanding, highly important work that had to be done thoroughly or not at all – and so damned boring.
But the sun was out, the sky was blue, the dresses were shorter than he’d ever known them, so that for once he took his time and strolled across the grass between the trees smoking a cigarette, discovering and not for the first time in his life, that after all, a man didn’t need a great deal to be utterly and completely happy – for the moment, at any rate. Somewhere a clock struck eleven. He glanced at his watch, swore softly and hurried towards the main road.
It was almost half past the hour when he went up the steps of the house in St John’s Wood and pressed the bell beside the brass plate that carried the legend Brown & Co – Importers and Exporters.
After a few moments, the door was opened by a tall greying man in a blue serge uniform and Chavasse hurried past him. ‘I’m late this morning, George.’
George looked worried. ‘Mr Mallory was asking for you. Miss Frazer’s been phoning down every five minutes for the past hour.’
Chavasse was already half-way up the curving Regency staircase, a slight flicker of excitement moving inside him. If Mallory wanted him urgently, then it had to be for something important. With any kind of luck at all the pile of reports that overflowed from his in-tray were going to have to be passed on to someone else. He moved along the landing quickly and opened the white-painted door at the far end.
Jean Frazer turned from a filing cabinet, a small, attractive woman of thirty who wore a red woollen dress of deceptively simple cut that made the best of her rather full figure. She removed her heavy library spectacles and shook her head.
‘You would, wouldn’t you?’
Chavasse grinned. ‘I went for a walk in the park. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and I seemed to see unattached young females everywhere.’
‘You must be getting old,’ she said and picked up the telephone.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Skirts are shorter than ever. I was often reminded of you.’
A dry, remote voice cut in on them. ‘What is it?’
‘Mr Chavasse is here, Mr Mallory.’
‘Send him in. No calls for the next hour.’
She replaced the receiver and turned, a slight mocking smile on her mouth. ‘Mr Mallory will see you now, sir.’
‘I love you too,’ Chavasse said and he crossed to the green baize door, opened it and went in.
‘Prison escapes have always been a problem,’ Black said. ‘They never average less than two hundred and fifty a year.’
‘I must say that seems rather a lot.’ Mallory helped himself to a Turkish cigarette from the box on his desk.
Although by nature a kindly man, as a Detective Chief Superintendent with the special Branch at New Scotland Yard, Charlie Black was accustomed to his inferiors running to heed his slightest command. Indeed, there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the sudden nervousness noted in even the most innocent of individuals when they discovered who and what he was. But we are all creatures of our environment, moulded by everything and anything that has happened to us since the day we were born and Black, branded by the years spent below stairs in the mansion in Belgrave Square where his mother, widowed by the first world war, had been cook, stirred uneasily in his chair for he was in the presence of what she, God rest her soul, would have termed his betters.
It was all there – the grey flannel suit, the Old Etonian Tie, the indefinable aura of authority. Ridiculous, but for the briefest of moments, he might have been a small boy again returning the old Lord’s dog after a walk in the park and receiving a pat on the head and sixpence.
He pulled himself together quickly. ‘It’s not quite as bad as it looks. About a hundred and fifty men each year simply walk out of open prisons – nothing to stop them. I suppose you could argue that the selection procedure has been faulty in the first place. Another fifty are probably men released on parole for funerals and weddings and so on, who simply take off instead of coming back.’
‘Which leaves you with a hard core of about fifty genuine escapes a year.’
‘That’s it – or was. During the past couple of years there’s been an increase in the really spectacular sort of escape. I suppose it all started with Wilson the train robber’s famous break from Birmingham. The first time a gang had actually broken into a prison to get someone out.’
‘Real commando stuff.’
‘And brilliantly executed.’
‘Which is where this character the Baron comes in?’
Black nodded. ‘To our certain knowledge he’s been responsible for at least half a dozen big breaks during the past year or so. Added to that he runs an underground pipeline by which criminals in danger of arrest can flee the country. On two occasions we’ve managed to arrest minor members of his organisation – people who’ve passed on men we’ve been chasing to someone else.’
‘Have you managed to squeeze anything out of them?’
‘Not a thing – mainly because they honestly hadn’t anything to say. The pipeline seems to be organised on the Communist cell system, the one the Resistance used in France during the war. Each member is concerned only with his own particular task. He may know the next step along the route, but no more than that. It means that if one individual is caught, the organisation as a whole is still safe.’
‘And doesn’t anyone know who the Baron is?’
‘The Ghost Squad have been trying to find out for more than a year now. They’ve got nowhere. One thing’s certain – he isn’t just another crook – he’s something special. May even be a Continental.’
Mallory had a file open on the desk in front of him. He examined it in silence for a moment and shook his head. ‘It looks to me as if your only hope of finding out anything about him at all would be to get a line on one of his future clients which in theory should be impossible. There must be something like sixty thousand men in gaol right now – how do you find out which one it is?’
‘A simple process of elimination really. If there’s a pattern to his activities it’s to be found in his choice of clientele. They’ve all been long term prisoners and have had considerable financial resources.’ Black opened a buff folder, took out a typed sheet of foolscap and a photo and passed them across. ‘Have a look at the last one.’
Mallory examined it for a moment and nodded. ‘Ben Hoffa – I remember this one. The affair on Dartmoor last month. A gang disguised as Royal Marine Commandos ambushed a prison vehicle during a military exercise and spirited him away. Any news of him since?’
‘Not a word. Hoffa and two confederates, George Saxton and Harry Youngblood were serving sentences of twenty years apiece for the Peterfield Airport robbery. Do you remember it?’
‘I can’t say I do.’
‘It was five years ago now. They hi-jacked a Northern Airways Dakota which was carrying just under a million pounds in old notes, a special consignment from the Central Scottish Bank to the Bank of England in London. A beautiful job. I have to admit that. Only the three of them involved and they got clean away.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Hoffa had the wrong kind of girl friend. She decided she’d rather have the £10,000 reward the Central Banks were offering than Ben and his share of the loot plus an uncertain future.’
‘And the money was never recovered?’
‘Not one farthing.’ Black handed across another photo. ‘That’s George Saxton. He escaped from Grange End last year. It was a carbon copy of the Wilson affair. Half a dozen men broke in under cover of darkness and actually brought him out. Not a word of him since then. As far as we’re concerned he might as well have ceased to exist.’
‘Which leaves Youngblood presumably?’
‘Only just or I miss my guess,’ Black said grimly and pushed another file across.
The face that stared up from the photo was full of intelligence and a restless animal vitality, one corner of the mouth lifted in a slight mocking smile. Mallory was immediately interested and quickly read through the details on the attached sheet.
Harry Youngblood was forty-two years of age and had joined the Navy in 1941 at the age of seventeen, finishing the war as a petty officer in motor torpedo boats. After the war he had continued in the same line of work, but on more unorthodox lines and in 1949 was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for smuggling. A charge of conspiracy to rob the mails had been dropped for lack of evidence in 1952. Between then and his final conviction in May 1961 he had served no further terms of imprisonment, but had been questioned by the police on no fewer than thirty-one occasions in connection with indictable offences.
‘Quite a character,’ Mallory said. ‘He seems to have tried his hand at just about everything in the book.’
‘To be honest with you, I always had a sneaking regard for him myself and I don’t usually have much time for sentimentality where villains are concerned. If he’d taken another turning after the war instead of that smuggling caper, things might have been very different.’
‘And now he’s doing twenty years?’
‘That’s the theory. We’re not too happy about what might happen considering the way his two confederates have gone. He’s at Fridaythorpe now under maximum security, but there’s a limit to how harshly he can be treated anyway. He had a slight stroke about three months ago.’
Mallory glanced at the photo again. ‘I must say he looks healthy enough to me. Are you sure it was genuine?’