Darkness and Confusion Read online

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  Darkness and Confusion

  (Gideon's Power)

  First published in 1969

  © John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1969-2013

  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 Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2013 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.

  ISBN EAN Edition

  0755131681 9780755131686 Print

  075513379X 9780755133796 Mobi

  0755134184 9780755134182 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.

  Creasey 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.

  Chapter One

  The Big Smoke

  George Gideon glanced into his mirror, put out the left-hand indicator and pulled his big old fashioned car into the side of the road. Ahead of him a cumbersome timber truck was standing, beyond that lay Battersea Bridge. As he got out of the car and stood up, he could see much more of the silvery surface of the Thames, two convoys of barges drawn slowly by a lighter one, the engine of which sounded clear and deliberate across the water. Battersea Park in one direction, a huddle of old, time-darkened buildings on the other. Although he saw and was aware of these things his gaze was concentrated on the great stacks of the Battersea Power Station and the huge, rolling billows of smoke which came out of each. It was a curious colour, not white, not grey, not black, but a blend of all of them, gradually fading until, hundreds of feet in the air, it was lost against the pale, misted sky, dispersing only to fall soft as snow and dark as soot onto the roofs, the streets, the walls of London.

  Gideon reached the parapet of the Chelsea Embankment.

  The truck driver was also by the parapet, paper pack of sandwiches in one hand, thermos flask of tea or coffee in the other, alternatively chewing and drinking. Cars and lorries swished by behind them and some sped over the bridge. Gideon was still aware of all of these, but concentrated on the power station. It might be said that it was a symbol of the power of London, but he was not held by it because of any kind of symbolism.

  Across the river, in that massive building which had withstood the Nazi bombing with high explosive and with firebombs, there had been sabotage, early that morning; not substantial, not alarming, and yet enough to worry him.

  He was not easily worried, because in a way, his life was all trouble – his working life, at least. He was Commander George Gideon, the chief executive of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, responsible for every one of the 8,000-odd detectives in London, and responsible for fighting every land of crime which London harboured. Crime went on, day in, day out, in unending variety, most of it petty although in aggregate serious enough. Much of it was organised by men of great ability, planned and executed like a military operation, but by far the greater part was haphazard; conceived and committed by men who, wanting nothing but a comfortable living, had decided that the easiest way was by breaking the law.

  The law-breaking affected everyone.

  It affected people in their homes and in their shops and in their factories. It touched the old and the young, the white and the black, the rich and the poor. A single crime, committed without thought by one man, could affect the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds; and could do many people great harm. London, partly through Gideon, was geared to fight crime on a large scale, and he was sensitive to every aspect of it. Particularly so to any form of crime in industry.

  There were, of course, variations, but mainly the crimes fell into a pattern. There was pilfering on a large or on a small scale; bold theft; vandalism. There was the careless crime such as the breaking of the Factory Acts regulations or the parking and drinking laws, and there were embezzlement and fraud. From time to time, also, there was sabotage, usually against one firm. There could be several motives for this. A manufacturer might be getting ahead of an unscrupulous competitor, for instance, or a man or a group of men might have some personal feud against individuals or management. Occasionally sabotage arose out of labour disputes, or had a political significance. Whatever the cause, it was usually possible to trace the culprits.

  Over a period of two or three months, there had been reports of sabotage in power-stations which served heavy industries using a lot of power, but neither reason nor perpetrator could be found. In the past week, there had been several, and this morning’s incident had been more serious than most. A transformer, sending out electricity to one of London’s densely-populated suburbs, had been damaged with a corrosive acid. It had been put into a plastic, acid-resisting oil can, and the machine-minder who had actually used the acid had not known what was in the can. The report quoted the department manager as saying that he was ‘above suspicion’. Gideon was always sceptical of such claims, but in this case what he had learned from AB Division suggested that it was probably true. If it was, then someone unknown had filled the can and left it for another to use unwittingly.

  The incident had caused a black-out over a sixteenth of London, delaying trains, bringing factories and docks to a standstill, causing risk to life in hospitals, and in all, making half a million people suffer to a greater or lesser degree.

  That was what worried Gideon.

  It could happen again, and on a larger scale. It could disrupt the whole of London, and such disruption could lead to disaster. These were difficult and tense days for London, home of a third of Britain’s industry, particularly those industries which produced consumer goods. It was easy to forget that; as easy to forget that export orders could be seriously affected
at a time when Britain had never needed greater productivity or more export markets. So this was not simply a matter of crimes to be stopped and criminals caught; it went much deeper.

  The smoke still billowed. Two more convoys of barges came into sight, fully laden, and an empty one from the other direction. The wake from all caused a gentle, lazy swell. Two swans appeared on the river near the truck driver, and several ducks; and on the parapet close to him were half-a-dozen pigeons. The man was in his middle forties, rather small, wearing a faded blue boiler suit and – unexpectedly – brown sandals. He made clucking noises to the pigeons, as if imitating their call. Two small boys appeared, out of nowhere, to watch.

  Innocence, thought Gideon; simple innocence.

  He remembered a notorious shop-lifter who, whenever he was out of prison, enjoyed his leisure time feeding the pigeons which flocked near some of London’s biggest buildings. The children one might judge fairly accurately to be innocent, but the man – there was simply no way of even guessing what was going on in his mind. That lorry-load of timber, for instance, could be stolen.

  Gideon half-laughed at himself, turned – and nearly bumped into a young couple walking by.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The girl was fair and pretty.

  “That’s all right,” she said, almost gaily.

  The man had a ruggedness of feature, and fair, curly hair. He simply nodded, and seemed to grip the girl’s arm protectively. Gideon crossed to his car. It was after six o’clock on a September evening, and in a little more than an hour, dark would begin to fall. There would then be different shift working at the power station, and it was quite possible that the saboteur himself would be back on duty. The thought of going across to see for himself was tempting, but Gideon resisted it. Power station security men as well as Divisional and Yard men had already been drafted in; if the man tried any more tricks he would almost certainly be caught tonight.

  But would it be repeated?

  It was the first incident actually inside one of London’s twenty-three power houses, and quite possibly there would be no more. Already some of the best men at the Yard had said they did not connect this incident with the sabotage at certain transformers and sub-stations. To alert all the power houses and sub-stations and to have every transformer house watched would be a major job, and he could not justify giving instructions for it yet.

  Yet.

  Instinctively, Gideon believed that serious trouble was brewing.

  In the morning, he would send a teletype message out to all London police stations, telling them to be alert for any signs of such trouble. Once he had made the decision he had a feeling of disquiet; he should have done that today, not waited until tomorrow. It was difficult to arrange at night; it could be done through Information, but routine instructions should never be allowed to interfere with the rush-hour of crime. Between seven o’clock and ten the rate of crime would rise dramatically, most of the police stations would be stretched to the limit of their resources.

  But first thing in the morning—

  He tried to put the sabotage out of his mind as he drove along the Embankment, into Fulham, then along the New King’s Road. There had been hardly any changes here since he had gone to live in Hurlingham, the better residential part of Fulham; that was over twenty-five years ago. Now he passed Eelbrook Common, then Parson’s Green, small, well-tended parks in the heart of the colonies of small and medium-sized houses. Most of the houses were well-tended, only here and there was one in need of paint. London looked prosperous.

  But what would happen to the tens of thousands who lived within a stone’s throw of the local electricity power supply if serious trouble did develop?

  He turned into the street where he lived – Harrington Street – and saw his own house, solid as the Victorian age when it had been built, painted white and black against weathered red brick. He could see Kate, his wife, tending a Window-box of begonias; tall, slim-waisted and full-bosomed, her hair a most attractive grey, she appeared to him to be quite lovely. As he pulled up she turned, and her face brightened.

  “George, you’re early! That’s wonderful!” Then she stopped moving towards him, and the watering-can drooped in her hand. “Or have you to go back to the office?”

  “No, Dr. Zhivago for us!” Gideon reassured her. “That’s if you can get ready in time.”

  A look of real understanding and affection passed between them.

  “We’ll be in time if you don’t take too long over dinner,” she said as they went into the house.

  “Are we on our own?” Gideon asked.

  “Yes – everybody’s out tonight,” Kate said, a little forlornly. But the mood passed quickly. Soon Gideon was eating lamb cutlets, French beans and fried potatoes, and Kate was making herself an omelette in a kitchen which had been modern thirty years before, and was still in shining order.

  As the Gideons drove from Fulham to Kensington, where Dr. Zhivago was having a third or fourth run, giving them a last chance to catch up with it, a small man in a boiler suit – not unlike the truck driver – was filling the oil cans at the Battersea Power Station.

  He used the proper oil.

  There were no incidents there, or anywhere else in power-stations, sub-stations or transformers, that night.

  This particular man finished his shift at ten o’clock, and went home with all the others off the shift. He cycled from the yard of the power station to his home in a narrow street in Wandsworth, across the Thames from Fulham, put his bicycle in a garden shed, and went into the house by the back door. A light showed from the passage, and he called out: “You home, Lizzie?”

  A door opened and television voices sounded.

  “Jack, I never heard you!” His wife, broad, fat, unexpectedly flat-chested, came hurrying. “It’s all right, love, dinner’s in the oven. Do you want it right away or will you wash first?”

  “I’ll wash,” he said.

  He looked very tired as he walked up the narrow stairs while his wife bustled about in the kitchen, washed his hands and face, then went in to the box-room where he did his office work, for he was secretary to several Pools and betting clubs. In it, unexpected in such a small, terrace house, was a telephone.

  He dialled.

  His wife, at the foot of the stairs, heard the ting! of the bell and the noise as he dialled, but could not hear what he said.

  “I was watched tonight,” he said to a man who answered his ring. “I don’t think they were after me, special – just watching anyone who went near the oil cans.”

  “That’s what we would expect,” the other man said. “Don’t do anything else at all unless we tell you to. Understand? Don’t do anything.”

  “I won’t,” promised the innocent-looking little man.

  He felt almost sorry, for last night he had done enough damage to harm half a million people. But it also gave him an intense satisfaction, which he did not recognise as a sense of power.

  About the same time, another, very different kind of man was standing by his wife’s side, looking down at their only daughter. Sheila was seven; and when she had been born, her mother had been only seventeen and he, Frank Morrison, nineteen. Then he had been a junior draughtsman at Hibild Limited; and then Hibild had been a small civil engineering company, with only six in the drawing office. Now, spreading out over London, Hibild had become a vast organisation, and he was a senior draughtsman, with excellent prospects.

  He had Lillian, his wife, whom he loved. He had Sheila, his daughter, whom he adored. He owned his own house in an estate overlooking Richmond Park on the south side of the river, his own mini-car, everything he could possibly want – except more children.

  Lillian simply did not conceive.

  In the beginning, she had appeared to be as worried about this as he, and they had visited gynaecologists of varying rep
utation and importance, and all had said the same thing: it was through no fault of his. Lillian had resigned herself fairly quickly to the improbability of having more children. He knew she was happy, and in a way so was he.

  But this was a precarious happiness. Looking down on Sheila as he did now, fear gripped him. Her fair hair was beautiful, her fair skin was without a blemish, she had upsweeping, gold-coloured eyelashes. In fact, she was Lillian all over again. The feeling of fear was very strong in him at this moment in a kind of premonition that his state of well-being was too good to last. It was like having a presentiment that one day she would be gravely ill, perhaps taken away from him.

  “Let’s go, in case we wake her,” Lillian said.

  She wasn’t really afraid of waking the child: she wanted to see tonight’s Love Story on television. He had some drawings to look over; Hibild were estimating for a big new factory near the Great West Road, and each senior draughtsman had been asked to present new ideas. If he could work up a good one, he would be well rewarded. The problem was tricky, however, the Company wanted easy access to the Great West Road and also easy access to the railway line, yet the amount of space available simply wasn’t enough unless they built higher than the Town Planning Commission would permit

  “There must be a way,” he said to himself.

  “Shut the door, dear, if you’re going upstairs,” Lillian said, already watching the screen.

  As he stood at the big sloping desk in his room, Frank Morrison’s uneasiness subsided, and he lost himself in concentration.

  In the back of an old Georgian house in Chiswick, another man lay restless on his bed. The house was dilapidated, the room in need of complete redecoration, the few oddments of furniture littered with unwashed cups and saucers, plates and dishes, clothes, old newspapers and magazines.