Vigilantes & Biscuits Read online

  “Since the Force consists of untrained civilian volunteers, great care must be taken to see that they are never unnecessarily put at risk.”

  But surely that did not – could not – mean that the patrols should stay at home at the first hint of danger?

  Suddenly he had an idea which came as an answer both to the problem, and to his underlying sense of restlessness, his basic urge for action.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do,” he said slowly. “You can hold back those patrols for a quarter of an hour, while we make sure that they’re fully protected… and suitably augmented.”

  “Augmented?”

  “That’s right, Tom.” There was now no mistaking the excitement in Gideon’s voice. “In a quarter of an hour, I can be with you, and I’ll take a place in one of the patrols myself. I suggest you draw a revolver out of stores, and join the other one. If we’ve got to send lambs to the slaughter, the least we can do is see that they’re adequately led.”

  18

  Murderer Manqué

  On the South Coast the daylight lingers just a little longer than in London. By eight o’clock, on the Wellesley Estate, everything was dark; but at Bognor Regis, a pale-grey sky still brooded over a mist-blue sea.

  Against this sky, the silhouettes of the conifers that gave Pine Corner its name reared stark and chilling. They certainly guaranteed seclusion, Matt Honiwell thought grimly. Not a single brick of the bungalow could be seen through them, nor a gleam of light from any of its windows.

  The crowded police car – Honiwell, Watson-Wright and a detective sergeant driver occupied the front seat; Gordon Cargill, Brodnik and the second detective sergeant were at the rear – turned from the main road into the private lane that ran past the side of the bungalow down to the beach.

  “Pull in here,” Honiwell ordered. The sergeant behind the wheel nodded, pulled to the side of the lane, and stopped.

  Matt glanced at Watson-Wright.

  “There is a gate along here, you said?”

  “That’s right, sir. What they’d have called a ‘tradesmen’s entrance’ in the old days. There’s a path the other side that winds round to the back door. But if you want the front door, you’ve only got to turn off the path just before you get to the house, walk across a patch of lawn between two pampas bushes, and you’re there.”

  Matt nodded.

  “These pampas bushes – are they thick?”

  “Very, sir. At least, they were last year when I was – er – here.”

  The two detective sergeants grinned at each other. Watson-Wright’s youthful cheeks took on a deeper hue. He was a fair-skinned, easily flustered type; the last man, going by appearances, who ought to have picked a police career. Yet he had been prompt in remembering and reporting that picture, more prompt than many another constable would have been in his place. So one never knew …

  “Anyone hiding behind one of those bushes would be concealed from the front door?” Matt asked.

  “I’d certainly say so, sir, yes.”

  “Right. Then here’s what I suggest we do. Mr. Cargill, you, sergeant” – he indicated the driver – “and I will go in at this gate, and walk round to the front door. You” – he indicated the sergeant in the back seat – “and Watson-Wright follow and conceal yourselves behind the pampas until we have got Lacey talking. Then I want you to make for the back of the house, and peer through the windows – especially the back bedroom ones. You’ve brought torches, I hope?” They nodded. “If you find a window that’s heavily curtained, and can’t be opened without smashing the glass, come round to the front and report it to me … Okay?”

  Everyone in the car chorused assent, except for Brodnik, who had been given no instructions and didn’t seem to expect any. The E.S.P. expert – looking old, slight and frail in the near-darkness – sat quietly, staring out of the window towards those towering pines. It was as if the trees had a message for him; a message he would rather not have heard.

  His hand on the inside door-handle, Matt suddenly realised he’d forgotten Brodnik. He swung round to the old man.

  “Will you be all right waiting here? Of course, if you’d rather accompany Mr. Cargill, the sergeant and me to the front door, you can. I just thought that if there was any rough stuff – ”

  “I’d be in the way?” Brodnik smiled faintly. “You’re right, Mr. Honiwell; I probably would be. I shall just sit here, and pray that my part in the proceedings isn’t – still to come.”

  For a moment, Matt didn’t grasp his meaning. But Gordon Cargill did, and let out a stifled groan of combined dismay and despair. Of course, Matt thought: Brodnik was by profession a corpse-diviner.

  He shuddered, a sound that seemed to be taken up mockingly by the trees, as a sudden zephyr from the sea started a hundred thousand pine needles swaying and rustling above their heads.

  “For God’s sake, Matt,” breathed Gordon. “Let’s get going!”

  His voice sounded as dry as the rustling needles.

  Matt nodded and opened the door. A couple of seconds later he had negotiated a creaking gate, and was leading Gordon and one of the detective sergeants up the winding path through the Pine Corner garden. It was getting too dark to see very much, and what light was left was lost in the dense shadow of the pines. He could just make out the low silhouette of the bungalow, the two areas of misty-grey in front of it, which he took to be the pampas bushes. Suddenly his nostrils caught a whiff of wood smoke, and he remembered the report of the afternoon’s bonfire.

  No time to think about that now, he told himself, and quickened his pace. A moment later, he was brushing past the pampas bushes. Almost at once he found himself on a veranda, facing the bungalow’s front door.

  The top half of the door was made of coloured glass, through which a weird pink light was streaming.

  Matt glanced over his shoulder, and saw that Gordon and the sergeant were right behind him. A rustling from the direction of the pampas bushes told him that Watson-Wright and the other sergeant were in their concealed positions.

  He swung back to the door, and pressed a button bell-push.

  Nothing happened, so he pressed it again.

  He kept his hand on it for a long time before footsteps sounded on the other side, and the door was opened.

  The man who opened it had his back to the light. He was in his shirtsleeves, and his left sleeve was rolled up.

  On the exposed arm, there was something that caught the light… a bead of blood, as though he had given himself an injection.

  Christ, thought Matt. What have we here – a psycho and a junkie combined?

  One thing was certain. No one normal would have stood, silently staring, as this man did.

  And there was nothing normal about his voice when he spoke. It was weak and quavering, and once having started, babbled on.

  “You’re … you’re the police, aren’t you? I saw you … watched you coming up the path from the back gate. Five of you, I counted … Where are the others? Gone round the back, to spy?”

  “That’s right,” said Matt quietly. “You have sharp eyes, Lacey.”

  “Sharp eyes … sharp brain … sharp everything,” Lacey burbled, and began to laugh. “Only one thing I lack, really … nerve.”

  He held up his left arm, and stroked away the bead of blood.

  “When I saw you coming I knew I’d never get away. I’m too unsteady on my legs, you see. Haven’t… haven’t eaten anything much for days … So I’ve just given myself a shot of morphine. It should have been a fatal dose … All – all I had to do was press home the plunger. But – but I couldn’t do it. Any more than I could ever do it – to her – ”

  “You’re talking about Barbara Cargill, I take it?” Matt said. “In that case Leonard Lacey, it is my duty to arrest you – ”

  “For her murder? Oh, no. That you can never get me for. She’s dying from completely natural causes – ”

  “Dying?” The use of the present participle galvanised Gordon Cargill out o
f his numb despair. “You mean – you mean she’s not – ”

  A loud rustling from the pampas bushes interrupted them. Watson-Wright came crashing through, up to the veranda, his face red with excitement.

  “I flashed my torch through one of the back bedroom windows. There’s a girl in there, lying on the bed. I thought she was dead at first, but when the torch flashed on her face, she blinked – tried to sit up – ”

  Gordon thrust Lacey aside as effortlessly as if he were a dummy, and made for the back of the hall. There were two doors leading off. Some instinct seemed to tell him which one to choose. He hurled open the right-hand one, and switched on the light beyond. Then he went into the room, out of sight of the hall.

  Nobody moved. Lacey had been thrown against a hall table. He stayed there, leaning heavily against it, sweat pouring off him, strength leaving him as the strong shot of morphine took effect. Watson-Wright, the detective sergeant and Matt remained on the porch, standing stock still, straining to catch the slightest sound from that bedroom …

  The first sound that came wasn’t slight. It was a half hysterical sobbing.

  Honiwell’s heart turned over when he realised that two voices were making it – a man’s and a girl’s. So Watson Wright hadn’t exaggerated. Barbara was alive and not only alive, but conscious …

  Matt’s relief was so great that everything seemed to reel around him.

  A sound from Lacey sobered him: a strange sound that was halfway between a scream and a giggle.

  The morphine was rapidly reducing Lacey to the state in which he’d kept Barbara Cargill for six cruel weeks. A state of weakness, dizziness, high delirium …

  He sank heavily into a chair beside the hall table. The light was shining fully on him for the first time, showing him to be a smallish man of about forty. He might once have been considered darkly handsome, but there wasn’t much that was handsome about him now. His face reflected his fever and shone with sweat, emphasising a weak, quivering mouth. Words came from it, now loud, now sinking to a whisper, in an incoherent jumble.

  “So Barbara’s won. Why wouldn’t she die? It was asking too much of me. I – I couldn’t kill her outright. It was mean of her – mean.”

  Then came what was, for Matt, the sickest moment of the whole case. Leonard Lacey’s face suddenly took on a look of half-crazy, wholly evil pride.

  “I thought I’d won this afternoon, though,” he said brightly. “I propped her up on her pillow so that she could see me through the window … and then I went down the garden and made a bonfire out of something she’d taken a great fancy to.

  Something, in fact, that almost seemed to be keeping her alive.

  “A bloody silly picture …”

  Within two hours, Matt was well on the way to tying up the whole of the Cargill kidnapping case. Leonard Lacey’s self injected shot of morphine had the same effect on his brain as a truth drug. He babbled the frankest answers to all Matt’s questions; describing in detail the whole kidnapping plot, and unhesitatingly giving the names of his three associates. Ten minutes’ telephoning to London, and Matt had started the process which was to end with the capture of them all. Lacey also revealed how he obtained his supplies of morphine: once a doctor, he still had friends fn the medical profession, who, imagining him to be an addict, prescribed for him.

  A full confession having been dictated, Lacey was taken, handcuffed, to Bognor police station. With Gordon in attendance, Barbara had long before been driven in an ambulance to the Bognor War Memorial Hospital. There she was found to be suffering from shock, nervous exhaustion, near-starvation and the effects of six weeks of morphine over-dosing.

  “Any other woman would be dead by now,” a baffled doctor said. “A strange thing, the will to survive.”

  When Matt looked in to see her, Barbara was propped up in bed. She was a slight, red-haired girl in her early twenties, with large, grey-green eyes; and although her face was deathly white, and her eyes were deeply sunken, there was a newly awakened aura of life about her. She was holding her husband’s hand, and when both of them tried huskily to express their thanks, Matt hurriedly excused himself.

  There had been times when this case had nearly broken him. It was somehow fitting that it should end by showing him just how unbreakable human beings could be.

  Since Gordon was booking into a hotel at Bognor to be as close as he could to his wife, Matt found himself, at around ten o’clock, driving back to London with only Jacob Brodnik for company. He found the E.S.P. man very poor company indeed.

  “An unforgivable error on my part,” he kept saying. “To have imagined that a subject was dead simply because the object she was transmitting was destroyed … ach, a schoolboy beginner would not make such a mistake! All the time, I must have been receiving a clear life signal – but my baffled mind chose to ignore it; to insist, in its confusion, that all was dark. I can only offer Mr. Cargill and you my sincere apologies.”

  “Which, so far as I am concerned, will not be accepted,” Matt told him. “You don’t seem to realise, Mr. Brodnik, that had it not been for you, nothing could have stopped the Cargill case from ending in tragedy. When the facts of your achievement get out, I believe it could mark a turning-point in the whole story of E.S.P. Here, for once, is evidence strong enough to convince the most confirmed sceptic – ”

  Matt broke off, aware of Brodnik’s twisted smile.

  “Evidence, Mr. Honiwell? What evidence is there left to convince anyone of anything? The picture was totally destroyed in that bonfire. I doubt if either Lacey or Mrs. Cargill will have more than a blurred memory of it by the morning.

  “In the end, the records will state that the police were led to Pine Corner by the purest chance. It may be added that one, Jacob Brodnik, gave some sort of help at some stage in the inquiry. But, I assure you, there will be nothing more.”

  “Well, let me assure you,” said Matt, “that there will be a great deal more in everything I say to the newspapers about this case. And I know that goes for Commander Gideon too.”

  “Commander Gideon … ye-es. From what you tell me, the successful ending of this case owes most of all to that very open-minded man. I hope – ”

  Honiwell glanced round as Brodnik broke off. The old man was peering fearfully through the windscreen. It was as though he could see much more than what was really there: a country road at night, swept by driving rain.

  “You hope what?” Matt demanded.

  Brodnik smiled self-deprecatingly. He might have been about to apologise for some awkward personal idiosyncrasy.

  “I sometimes get strange, sudden anxieties about people … a sense that they are in danger, or facing a serious crisis. I have that feeling very strongly at this moment about Commander Gideon. I am just hoping that he will be all right.”

  Matt attempted one of his reassuring grins; but he was too conscious of who and what his passenger was. His lips simply wouldn’t obey his order to smile, and he looked almost as fearful as Brodnik as he said, fervently, “I am just hoping so, too.”

  19

  Ambush

  From the moment he started patrolling the Wellesley Estate, Gideon’s excitement at the project started fading, and he found himself very close to the mood of desperation and frustration that had overtaken Riddell. The curious atmosphere of the place – those rows and rows of identical buildings, with a hint of something evil lurking round every corner – began to get as deeply under his skin as it so obviously had done under Tom’s. Suddenly, he was uneasy about the whole concept of Gideon’s Force, and fearful for the safety of its members – especially the six who were with him on this patrol.

  One of them was Harold Neame, the headmaster who had started the whole vigilante movement, and then become the Force’s leading supporter. Another was the Reverend Hugh Suncliffe, the local vicar. A third was Mrs. Thompson, J.P. and Labour councillor. The remaining three were a bus conductor, a milkman and a girl librarian.

  They had all been told, at the outs
et, that there were special risks involved in tonight’s patrol: they would have guessed as much, anyway, from the fact that the Commander of the C.I.D. was leading them. Far from being deterred, they had shown almost excessive enthusiasm and a confidence in his leadership that Gideon found more than a little disturbing.

  “So this is it, is it?” Harold Neame had said, his steel-grey eyes glittering with excitement. “The moment of truth, of confrontation, with the enemy. I thank whatever powers that be that I haven’t missed it.”

  “I entirely agree, Mr. Neame,” Mrs. Thompson asserted authoritatively. “Though I should hardly have put it in those words, I, too, consider it an honour to be here.”

  The milkman – an Irishman – had put it rather less conventionally.

  “When I volunteered to join Gideon’s Force, I’d never thought to be walkin’ into battle behind the great man himself. It’s a story I’ll be tellin’ till me dying day, even if that happens to be tonight.”

  The girl librarian gave a gasp of alarm, which the bus conductor seized as an opportunity to put his arm protectively, or otherwise, round her shoulders.

  “Don’t worry, girlie. Nothing bad is going to happen to any of us. Not with Mr. Gideon coming all the way from Scotland Yard to make sure that it don’t. Isn’t that right, Mr. G.?”

  Gideon studied them with a little less than enthusiasm. The girl librarian couldn’t be more than eighteen; the vicar less than seventy; Harold Neame could prove to be more than tiresome. And these were the front-line troops he was wheeling out against a deadly enemy, known to be especially dangerous tonight! He decided to play it straight with them. It was the least he could do.

  “No, that’s not entirely right. I’m here to lead you, not protect you. All my presence guarantees is, that you’ll have a pair of sharp eyes at your service – and a trained police mind accustomed to emergencies. I also have a revolver, which may be of some use in certain circumstances. I’m providing truncheons to any of you who want one. And we are doubling the usual number of area cars on duty for the period of this patrol. There will be four of them circling the Estate constantly. I shall remain in continual walkie-talkie touch, and ensure that one of those cars is never more than thirty seconds away from our patrol.”