An Uncivilised Election Read online

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  An Uncivilised Election

  (Gideon’s Vote)

  First published in 1964

  Copyright: John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1964-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Creaseyto be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755117573 9780755117574 Print

  0755118766 9780755118762 Pdf

  0755126211 9780755126217 Mobi

  0755126238 9780755126231 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Creasey – Master Storyteller – was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.

  Creasy wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the ‘C’ section in stores. They included:

  Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

  Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.

  He also founded the British Crime Writers’ Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey’s stories are as compelling today as ever.

  Explosive Arrest

  “Just a minute, Mr. Quatrain,” Gideon interrupted. “I want a word with Mr. Miles.”

  Miles snatched his right hand from his pocket. In it was a cylinder, cigar-shaped, black in colour. He drew his arm back to throw this. Gideon, knowing the danger, realizing what was likely to happen from the moment Miles had heard the truth, closed with him and thrust out his right arm to clutch at Miles’s wrist. Gideon saw the cylinder drop from the man’s fingers. He let Miles go, stretched out his hand, and caught the thing.

  For a terrifying moment he held it in his hand, expecting the explosion. He turned his face away and covered it with his free hand. He heard Quatrain exclaim, felt movement about him, lived in anguish for seconds which never seemed to end.

  1: Dissolution

  Theoretically a policeman, like a priest, should be above politics, or at least untouched by party politics, yet it is the policeman who is responsible for enforcing the laws made by the politicians. Gideon, politically a middle-of-the-road man who did not always agree with middle-of-the-road politicians, felt that the law which made civil servants political neuters was good in principle but as it affected the individual, quite intolerable. In the course of most years, he could have made half-a-dozen vigorously uncomplimentary speeches saying what he thought of members of Parliament and members of the Government; when he did make them, however, it was within the privacy of his home. His colleagues at New Scotland Yard might guess what he felt and how he would vote, but none of them could be sure.

  The Headquarters of the Metropolitan Police was, among other things, a spawning ground for rumours. When Gideon reached his office just after nine o’clock on a clear, crisp October morning, the gleam in the bright eyes of Superintendent Lemaitre, his chief assistant and good friend, told of rumour or sensation.

  “Morning, Lem.” Gideon hung his grey trilby on a peg of the hatstand, eased his collar, and stepped across to the window. A sight of the Thames in sunshine always did him good, and this morning the stream of cars and people going over Westminster Bridge looked bright and eager and shiny in the sun. “Nice one, too.”

  “If this is how you like ‘em,” said Lemaitre. He was a tall, angular man, almost scraggy about the neck, with thin fair hair brushed carefully to hide as much pate as possible, a bony nose and chin, a taste for bright ties and colour in clothes. This morning his greeny-brown jacket hung on a hanger on the hatstand, his silk bow tie was made of green-and-white spots, and his shirt could have been used as an example of perfection by any detergent manufacturer.

  Gideon turned to study him.

  “What’s up, Lem?”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Somebody planning to blow up the Houses of Parliament?”

  Lemaitre’s voice dropped in disappointment. “So you have heard.”

  “Haven’t heard a thing this morning,” Gideon assured him. Then he frowned. “The Fight for Peace crowd haven’t been making any trouble across there, have they?”

  By craning his neck he could see the terrace of the Houses of Parliament, and the reflection of Gothic grandeur in the calm surface of the river. He stared toward it, then looked back again, and repeated: “Have they?”

  “If you ask me, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put a bomb under that place when they’re voting for an increase in their own salaries,” Lemaitre said. “Get the lot of them at one go then. The Prime Minister’s handing in his chips today.”

  Gideon moved from the window to his desk and sat down.

  The big, leather-topped desk was set cornerwise across the room, so that all the light from the window fell on it. Trays marked In, Out, Pending, Urgent were secured to the far side of the desk, and in front of him was a thick folder, filled with reports which had come in during the night. Somewhere in this rabbit warren of a building a dozen senior detectives were waiting to see him, each of them in charge of one of the cases covered by these reports. He alone had to know the details of each major case at the Yard, had to be able to discuss it with the man in charge, to put his finger on errors, to make suggestions, above all to think. All of the men were sound, some were brilliant, but over the years they had come to regard him as a kind of father figure; now and again, silently, he looked upon himself in the same way and wondered if it was a good thing. Certainly there were times when it made him feel as Atlas must have felt.

  Lemaitre was watching him intently but less eagerly; obviously he was disappointed by his reaction.

  “Got a private line to Number 10?” Gideon asked at last.

  “Good as,” asserted Lemaitre.

  “Sure about this?”

  “Paterson said he heard the P.M. saying that he was going to have an audience this morning, and a dissolution’s been in the air for months. Waited too long, if you ask me. Mark my word, they’re going to spring it on the electors. Won’t give ‘em any time to think about it. Snap election, that’s what it’s g
oing to be.”

  “Can’t be much of a snap if it’s been in the air for months,” Gideon pointed out.

  “It’s the date they choose, voting day itself,” declared Lemaitre, warming up. He pushed his chair back and began to waggle his forefinger. “It’s October 10th now. If the Queen does dissolve Parliament today, they’ll fix the earliest date they can. Lemme see, when—”

  “Lem,” interrupted Gideon, “how’s crime?”

  “Eh?”

  “What’s on our plate this morning?”

  “Oh.” Lemaitre looked a little abashed, he had been so carried away. “Not interested in the next government of the country, eh? Philistine. There isn’t much that’s new. Curson’s coming in, he’s got stuck on that skeleton in the well down in Cornwall. Only reason they sent for us, they knew it was going to be next door to impossible. Riddell’s got those two swine who did in the bank messenger last week – arrested them in the night, and says it’s as good as over. They still haven’t got the mother of that kid found gassed in Hendon, but she’ll turn up. They had a bank job out at Acton, two or three men burrowed under the road – right under the road from the opposite side, mind you – and broke through the wall of the strong room. Took about fifty thousand quid.”

  Lemaitre broke off, leaned back in his chair, linked his fingers, and thrust his chest out.

  “Oh, I forgot. The Quack’s at it again. Over at Peckham. Same drill as before. Answers an advert for a locum, gets the job thanks to faked certificates, takes over the doctor’s job for a few days, until some of the women tumble to the fact that he’s no more a doctor than I am. A woman in her forties didn’t like the way he listened to her heartbeats.” Lemaitre gave an expansive grin. “Takes all kinds to make a world. You’ve got to hand it to the Quack in a way – he gets away with it time and time again.”

  It would not have taken much then to make Gideon angry, but he passed this story over, opened the file, and said shortly: “All right. I’ll look through these before seeing anyone.”

  “Okeydoke,” said Lemaitre.

  Gideon thumbed through the reports, including that on the Quack. There were now known to be seven instances of his special trick, and there might be more which no one knew about. It was not until a woman patient’s suspicions had been aroused by a locum, four weeks ago, that the British Medical Council had realized that the same man was involved in a number of cases. The B.M.C. had gone carefully into it before presenting the problem to the Yard. So far there had been no publicity, and no general warning had gone out to doctors; unless they caught the Quack soon, a warning would have to be sent to all general practitioners.

  There was a question at the end of the report from the division: “Please advise whether we question all the woman patients the man examined so that they’re bound to realize he was a phony or let it ride?”

  Gideon thought: No point in stirring up a lot of embarrassment yet. Then he wondered if he was right.

  Lemaitre, unaware of Gideon’s mood, looked up suddenly.

  “Old Charlie Kimble fell off a roof, chasing a couple of cat burglars who got away. Broke his leg. Nothing much really,” finished Lemaitre. He was an ebullient character, seldom subdued for long. “It’s all there. Who are you going to start with?”

  “I’ll see in a minute,” Gideon said.

  Lemaitre had listed a few of the crimes on London’s calendar, sweeping through and glossing over them with the casualness of long experience with crime. “Nothing much” included a murdered child, a big bank robbery, an attack on a bank messenger, and a hundred other crimes, most of which had been committed in the London metropolitan area. The whole of the Criminal Investigation Department’s force was heavily involved in the inquiries, every one of the divisions had plenty of work on hand, most of them were understaffed. All over London new crimes were being plotted, some by old criminals, some by people who had never committed a crime in their lives. Crimes of violence were being planned, some perhaps taking place, children were being starved and ill-treated, in a hundred offices and a hundred shops little men, clerks and assistants, were slipping a few shillings or a few pounds into their pockets out of the till or the cashbox. Every one of London’s police courts had at least a dozen cases up for hearing this very morning, from prostitution to indecent assault, from murder to being drunk and disorderly. The rash of crime, like acne upon the face of London, was neither better nor worse.

  “Nothing much really,” Lemaitre had insisted.

  Lemaitre’s preoccupation with the likely dissolution of Parliament and the coming general election confirmed what Gideon had suspected for a long time: Lemaitre was doing his job almost by habit, skimming the surface of each case instead of probing. That was worrisome. In this office of the Commander of the C.I.D., the chief executive’s office, there was no room for superficial reactions, for a shallow, cynical assessment of such crimes as the Quack’s. Lemaitre was stale, of course; he had been at this particular job too long, and he was a man who should be out and about, carrying the war energetically into the criminal’s camp. He probably did not realize that, but he was bored and something like the Quack brightened life for him.

  He was Gideon’s oldest and closest friend at the Yard – and he was not doing his job.

  This thought passed in and out of Gideon’s mind during the morning. He tried to be fair and dispassionate. By some standards, there was nothing much today, certainly no great spate of crime. The newspapers headlined the bank robbery, of course, and spared paragraphs for the others, but any experienced Fleet Street man would have agreed that it was a dull day. Was it really surprising that Lemaitre, immersed in such comparative dullness, should look elsewhere for his excitement?

  It was one of the not uncommon periods at the Yard when everyone was stale, up to a point. There had been no great stimulus, no great incentive to all-out effort. Taken by and large, it had been a quiet summer in England, even in the provinces and the big coastal resorts. It was almost as if the continual and continuing efforts to raise the level of the national conscience and the social good were paying off. At heart Gideon did not believe this; they were in the middle of a kind of lull. Lulls had come often enough before, and the danger was that when this one broke the Yard would be caught napping.

  He did not go out to lunch, but had a plate of cold meat and some salad brought into the office; salad was not his idea of the right provender for human beings, but he was putting on weight and wanted to check it. He was drinking a cup of lukewarm coffee when a telephone bell rang. Lemaitre was still over at the pub in Cannon Row where the Yard men usually gathered, as a kind of club. Gideon lifted the receiver.

  “Gideon.”

  “Can you spare me a minute, George?” That was Rogerson, the Assistant Commissioner for Crime.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right with you,” Gideon said. As he put down the receiver he pressed a bell-push for a sergeant, who came in as he was smoothing down his thick, iron-grey hair. The sergeant was a lean, brown whippet of a man; Gideon’s massive body made two of his.

  “I’ll be with the Assistant Commissioner,” Gideon said. “Stay here until Mr. Lemaitre gets back.”

  “Right, sir!”

  The passages of the Yard had an almost bleak look; plain light-coloured walls and plain dark-coloured doors with name plates so small one could hardly read them. Gideon walked with his head thrust forward, thick shoulders slightly rounded. As he turned a corner he heard a man say behind him: “Always looks as if he owns the place.”

  In a way, Gideon knew, this was true; sometimes he felt as if he owned it. Though he knew, too, nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could be more nonsensical.

  He tapped perfunctorily at Rogerson’s door and then went in. Rogerson’s secretary, a youngish blonde, looked up from her tidy desk.

  “Good morning, Mr. Gideon.”

  “Morning.”

  “Mr. Rogerson’s expecting you.”

>   Think I didn’t know? Gideon thought. He nodded and stepped into the larger office. This one also overlooked the Thames and was bright with sunlight.

  Rogerson was sitting at his big pedestal desk. He was an ill-looking man, slightly purplish about the cheeks and lips at times, with eyes which always seemed tired. There had been talk of his retirement, years ago, but he stayed on; Gideon thought secretly that this was an instance where retirement would probably lead straight to the grave. Here was another man who sometimes felt that he carried the cares of the Yard on his shoulders.

  “Hallo, George.”

  “Hallo, Hugh.”

  “You heard?” Rogerson was looking up, and motioning to a chair.

  “Heard what?”

  “A general election’s coming up.”

  “Official?” asked Gideon. Lemaitre would be cock-a-hoop.

  “The Prime Minister announced it in the House five minutes ago. I’ve just had a flash.”

  “Couldn’t have been delayed much longer,” Gideon observed. “This government’s been in over four years. It will keep Uniform busy for a bit.”

  “Not only Uniform,” Rogerson declared. He leaned back in his chair, and Gideon had a feeling that he was worried, as if there was something in his mind that he didn’t relish talking about. “The Home Secretary thinks that we might have a lot of bother with the Fight for Peace people, and the Q Men. We’ve had an official directive – check both of them even more closely than we have already, so that we know just what they’re up to.”

  Gideon wrinkled his nose.

  “What’s the matter?” demanded Rogerson.

  “Don’t like it much,” Gideon remarked. “If we start probing into political or neopolitical groups at this stage, a lot of people will start talking about unconstitutional methods, and we might find ourselves running into trouble.” When Rogerson just sat staring at him, he went on almost irritably: “What’s the real size of it?”