Gideon's Fire Read online

  At the last moment he turned and waved again, thought warmly about her for as long as it took him to reach the corner, and then forgot her. It was not that he was preoccupied with any particular official problem; he was simply aware that he would be half an hour late at the office.

  No one, least of all the Assistant Commissioner for Crime, would raise an eyebrow if the executive chief of the Department was hours late, but to Gideon punctuality was both virtue and obligation. If he turned up later than he had promised to, then he could hardly blame his men for slacking. Joe Bell, now his chief aide, would not slack consciously, but lesser men probably would. In an almost exasperating way the Department had come to depend too much on its Commander, and any slackness which began at the top could spread down the ranks and even out into the Divisions.

  Inevitably several superintendents, including two seniors, would want to see him this morning, mostly on cases needing urgent attention. If he kept them kicking their heels, it would take the edge off their keenness and might lead to the failure of a case or the loss of a wanted man.

  Gideon, although he would have scoffed had anyone suggested it, was at once a slave and a martyr to his job.

  Both he and Kate had overslept, and the children had all got themselves off, to work or to school, thinking it a kindly gesture not to disturb their parents. So it had been, but he wished that they hadn’t misplaced their kindness this morning. He had bolted breakfast, with Kate protesting that a few minutes really couldn’t make any difference, and when he reached the door of the garage he was trying to persuade himself that she was quite right, and it was absurd to behave as if every minute mattered. He ought to take things more easily, and get rid of a responsibility complex.

  The thought made him grin.

  ‘What a hope,’ he said, and unlocked the padlock and pushed up the door which worked on a roller and slid beneath the roof. His car, a not very new Humber Hawk, black and shining, almost filled the small garage. He had to squeeze into the driving seat and then back out with great care. As he turned on the ignition, a green truck appeared in his driving mirror, and instead of passing, it stopped.

  ‘Damned fool,’ said Gideon to himself, and started the engine; at least that gave no trouble. He tooted his horn, and the sound was deafening in here, but it did not make the truck move on. If he squeezed out so as to complain he might find himself watching the tail of the truck; the best thing was to be patient, but after a few minutes he began to play an exasperated tune on the horn.

  The truck moved at last. Gideon backed out, and was half-way into the road when a horn screeched at him, and he jammed on his brakes. A Jaguar flashed by in the mirror, going much too fast.

  ‘This is my morning,’ Gideon said aloud, and without talking about it, he took himself in hand. Every movement, of foot, hand and eye, became more considered. He swung slowly into the road, pulled up, and was about to get out to close the garage when Kate appeared, her fine tall body moving with careless ease, as if she were breasting life with an abiding if latent passion. She drew up to the window, and said:

  ‘I’ll close the garage, dear.’

  ‘Bless you,’ Gideon said. ‘Any message?’

  ‘No, I just came to see why you were so long.’ Kate stood back. ‘Have a good day,’ she added, and waved and turned to the garage.

  Gideon drove a little more slowly than usual, because of his deep-set belief that no man in a car should ever be in a hurry - except occasionally Flying Squad cars - but by the time he was moving along New Kings Road, Fulham, past the Eelbrook Common and towards Chelsea and Westminster, he had forgotten all that, and was cutting along at ten miles an hour over the official thirty. Traffic began to build up, but did not irritate him; Kate had driven irritation away, which was Kate’s great gift.

  Gideon thought back to last night, a golden night, and the reason for oversleeping. He chuckled, then nipped past a van which looked top heavy with sacks of onions and carrots.

  He began to think of the different cases which the men waiting for him would want to discuss. There was Riddell, newly appointed a superintendent, on his first big murder investigation, the case of the three young women found buried in the same grave near Chichester. Riddell had been away on the job for a week, and had telephoned last night to say that he thought he ought to have a talk with Gideon; that meant he was out of his depth. Cornish would want guidance on last week’s bank robbery, when three thieves had got away with twenty-seven thousand pounds after tunnelling beneath two rows of shops and a main road; one of the men had been caught but the others and the money were still missing.

  Lemaitre, once his chief assistant and now a kind of general factotum at the Yard, sometimes on night duty, sometimes on day, locum tenens for any senior official on sick leave or holiday leave, was bursting at the seams to make an arrest in a share-pushing case, but Gideon wasn’t too certain that the time was ripe. There were a dozen other, lesser cases, and there would be new ones both for the Yard and for the Divisions. He had an appointment with the Assistant Commissioner for noon, and would have his work cut out to get everything else arranged and all the men briefed in time to keep the appointment. Before the day was done he was going to rue the loss of that half-hour, but he was now quite good-tempered about the prospect.

  He turned into the Yard, found his usual parking space blocked by a car he didn’t recognise, left his key with a constable who came hurrying to help, and went up the flight of stone steps. It was on this daily morning walk that Gideon really seemed to become part of the big red-brick buildings.

  He was a tall man, six feet two, massive, with a thick chest, slightly rounded shoulders smoothly fitted with an excellently tailored coat, and unexpectedly flat at the stomach. His jowl sometimes looked rather fleshy and there was a hint of overweight at the back of his neck, but his belly was as hard as a board, and he took pride in his physical strength.

  That strength gave Gideon much of his quality, for it explained his complete confidence in himself. Sight of him mounting the steps, head jutting forward, taking in everything he saw, was an indication of his character: the way he always bored ahead, without allowing anything to push him off the path he wanted to go, his weighty, sometimes slow movements sometimes giving an indication of remorselessness; where he meant to go, George Gideon would go.

  He walked along the passage which connected the new and the old buildings, well aware that by now the telephone in his office had rung and been answered, that Bell and possibly Lemaitre would be in the office with the morning’s reports ready, that everyone waiting to see him would know that he was on the way, some of them on edge in case he found fault with work done or proposals made.

  He heard the click of his own door closing as he reached the passage leading to it, and marvelled that grown men like Lemaitre and Bell - Bell was in his early sixties - should behave rather like schoolboys wondering if the head was on the prowl; but it did no harm. Other doors were ajar, men were glancing at him, he saw brown-clad Riddell standing by a desk, obviously impatient; Riddell, who had once been the slackest man in the Department, was now always on the go. Gideon pretended not to notice him, and thrust open the door of his own office.

  Lemaitre, a tall, thin, almost weedy man, with a bony face, bright and very alert grey eyes, with his brown hair cropped close almost in a crew cut, his bow tie a little too bright in green and blues, his grey suit somehow contriving to look a little loud, turned round from the window where he was looking down at the river.

  Joe Bell was sitting at his pedestal desk, a small one in a corner opposite Gideon’s big one. Joe was a shorter man, and rather plump. His thin fluffy hair was grey, he looked all of his sixty-odd years, and he had a kind of benignity which Gideon found restful. Nothing ever made Bell panic, and no one knew more about the Yard or the ways of the police, criminals and the judiciary. Bell might have gone a long way had he had a little of Gideon’s drive or his fire; but as it was, his tweeds always wanted pressing, he was never really c
losely shaved, his pipe always wanted scraping.

  ‘Morning, Gee-Gee,’ Lemaitre greeted, with the privilege of long friendship and familiarity. ‘You broken a leg or something?’

  ‘I swam here,’ Gideon said, nodding to Joe Bell. ‘Didn’t you see me while you were counting the windows in County Hall?’

  ‘Shurrup,’ retorted Lemaitre. His voice had a Cockney twang, and he always spoke as if he were in a hurry to get this subject finished and the next one on the way. ‘There’s Riddell sweating on the top line because he ought to be on the way down to Chichester, there’s Cornish . . . .’

  ‘We’ll get round to it all, Lem,’ Gideon said, and took off his coat, draping it over the back of the leather-seated chair behind his big, old-fashioned desk. He sat down. ‘Anything much in, Joe?’

  ‘Fraid so,’ said Bell, quietly.

  ‘Hmp. What?’ Gideon looked sharply across the desk, aware of but ignoring Lemaitre’s impatience, knowing that Bell would not speak like that unless this had been a bad night. Whenever London had a heavy night of crime, Gideon felt a kind of personal responsibility, for it should be the work of the police to stop crime as well as to make sure it was punished. He was not only part of his job, he was part of London.

  ‘Fourteen-year-old girl strangled in her bed over at Islington,’ Bell answered.

  ‘Sex job?’

  ‘Couldn’t be nastier. Hands tied to the bedposts, and raped.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Gideon felt momentarily sick, and thought, as he always did when a girl had been the victim of some crime, of his own daughters, Prudence, Priscilla and Penelope. Three faces, bright and eager, seemed to loom in front of him - three pairs of eyes were questioning him. Why? ‘What line have we got?’ asked Gideon.

  ‘Not much,’ answered Bell. ‘Carson of KL was on the blower only ten minutes ago, wanted a word with you.’

  ‘Get him on the line, will you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘George,’ intervened Lemaitre, ‘I know you’re going to have a thick morning, how about letting me get cracking? You know as well as I do that we’ve got enough to charge Ericson with. He floated those shares at a pound each and three parts of the prospectus was a lie. We - ’

  ‘Have we got him tight enough to be sure of a conviction?’ Gideon asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Anything more in about the case?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Gideon, as if struck with a new idea, ‘you go and see if you can find Roscoe. If we can get Roscoe to give evidence, we’ll have Ericson tight as a drum. What about it?’

  ‘You know damned well that Roscoe’s crossed the channel!’

  ‘Not sure that he has, Lem,’ Gideon said. ‘I think he tried to make us think he had, but that’s all. Have another go.’

  ‘But dammit . . . . ’

  A telephone bell rang. ‘This’ll be Carson,’ said Bell, and Gideon picked up one of three telephones on his desk and said into it: ‘Gideon.’

  He covered the mouthpiece with his big left hand, grinned at Lemaitre, and whispered: ‘It won’t work, Lem, just because I’ve got a lot to do this morning you needn’t think you’re going to rush me into picking Ericson up. We can’t do that until we’ve got more evidence, and the quickest way to evidence will be Roscoe. Why don’t you see if that thing you call a mind can work? . . . Hallo, yes, who . . . Oh, hallo, Carson.’

  He waved Lemaitre away, ignoring the other’s wry grimace and exaggerated groan. Both Lemaitre and Bell knew that Gideon had put the fraud case out of his mind, and was now giving his whole attention to Carson of KL Division. He began to frown, for Carson was one of the rule-of-thumb men, very efficient of his kind but almost entirely dispassionate. He could go into clinical details as to what had happened to the fourteen-year-old Ivy Manson at her home in Islington.

  Lemaitre said: ‘Like a brick wall, that’s what Gee-Gee is,’ and went out. He closed the door softly.

  ‘. . . . so there isn’t any definite line,’ Carson was saying. ‘There are four flats in the house, all self-contained. Any one of the tenants could have got in, the Mansons are still about fifty years behind the times, Commander. They leave a key dangling inside the front door, so all you have to do to get it is open the letter box and hook it out by the string. No doubt the key was used . . .’

  ‘That key?’ demanded Gideon.

  ‘I didn’t mean that one, I meant a key. No scratches on the door, none on the window, only possible way the beast could have got in was by the door, using a key.’

  ‘Do you want any help?’ Gideon asked.

  ‘That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about, Commander.’ Carson was formal. ‘I think that everyone in the street should be questioned, and that will need more men than I can put on the job unless I am to neglect other investigations. I would like at least six additional men.’

  ‘I’ll fix it.’

  ‘Thank you. Bell has sent a fingerprints officer over, and my murder team is on the spot in strength,’ Carson went on. ‘So far, there is nothing to go on and the first essential is to find out whether anyone was seen coming into the house during the night. I am inclined to think that the murderer knows the family, the indications are that he opened the front door and went straight to the girl’s bedroom, which is a small one leading off the kitchen, which lies between it and the rest of the flat - it’s almost cut off, in fact. It is evident that he gagged her before she could call out for help, and . . .’

  ‘Check the whole neighbourhood for schizos and anyone known to the police for the slightest sex abnormality - indecent behaviour, indecent assault, you know the drill,’ Gideon said. ‘This is one we want finished in a hurry, we don’t want that brute wandering about loose.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Carson. ‘Thank you, Commander.’ His manner told Gideon that he was annoyed because he had been reminded of the obvious, but once he put the receiver down, Gideon forgot about Carson and the child; he had to concentrate on whatever Bell had next.

  ‘Next,’ he invited.

  ‘Only one other bad one,’ Bell said. ‘It’s the top one on your desk.’ In front of Gideon were all the files on all the cases going through the Yard, as well as a complete list of all the major crimes reported during the night. ‘Fire, out in Lambeth,’ Bell went on. ‘One of those old tenement buildings. Whole family was wiped out - mother, five kids, and the father. Several other people burned and suffering from shock, and the whole building was gutted - place went up like a match-box.’ Bell paused, and Gideon sat still, knowing that the worst was still to come and Bell looked older even than his years as he went on: ‘One of our chaps looks like being the eighth victim. The last I heard he hadn’t much chance. Uniformed man named Jarvis, one for the George Medal according to the reports. But the worst of it is, George, it was arson. Started with petrol. No doubt about it.’

  3 DYING MAN

  Gideon read the report from Superintendent Manning, of QR Division, still oblivious of the men waiting to see him, even Riddell and his sense of urgency, and of the girl at Islington. That had been hideous; in its way, this was worse. Manning was not only a sound Divisional head, he put in thorough if wordy reports, and still liked to do them in his own handwriting - not copper plate, but very small and legible.

  Manning had been told of the fire at half past four that morning, and gone over to see for himself; that was characteristic, for he was extremely conscientious. Moreover, he had co-ordinated reports from his own men, from the Chief Fire Officer of the district, and statements from neighbours. There was no doubt about the arson, and the gallon can in which the petrol had been kept had been found among the charred wreckage, burnt almost out of recognition, but with the tell-tale sediment or ash that petrol always left after this kind of burning. Petrol had been thrown about the flat, as far as the first indications went, one suggestion was that a man had stood at the front door, poured the petrol out along the passage hallway off which all the
rooms led, and then set light to it and closed the door.

  In all the tenement buildings there was a gap between the bottom of the door and the floor, and petrol had undoubtedly flowed into the rooms where the members of the family had been sleeping. Fumes appeared to have overcome the mother and the two elder children, who slept in the same room, and the remains of their bodies had been found in their beds. One, very young, child had been found in a cot in the other bedroom. Two had been thrown out of the window, one by the constable, Jarvis, the other by the father of the children, George Miller. Miller and Jarvis had jumped, but Miller had died on his way to hospital, where the two children had been dead on arrival.

  Gideon felt his heart savaged by what he had to read.

  The report went on:

  ‘Police Constable Jarvis was still alive when he arrived at the Lambeth Hospital, and at eight forty-five remained alive, but the hospital authorities hold out little hope of his recovery. There is a faint possibility that he will recover consciousness enough to make a statement, and two men are at his bedside to make sure that nothing is missed. His wife, Emily Maude, is also at his side. Their three children, a boy aged four, and girls aged seven and ten, are being cared for by neighbours, and the Division will make sure that everything necessary is done for them and for Mrs. Jarvis. Jarvis is reported to be suffering from first degree burns over a large area of his body, and it is clear that these burns were incurred during his attempt to rescue the family.

  The flat immediately above the one where the Miller family lived has been empty for two weeks, so no one was burnt there. Tenants of all the other flats in the building had time to escape.

  One person, an elderly woman named Forsyth, who lives in a small house opposite the tenement buildings has so far made a statement which may give some assistance. She suffers from insomnia, got out of bed in her front bed-sitting room, and made tea during the early hours of the morning. She reports that she cannot be positive of the actual time, but she noticed certain events in the following sequence: