Gideon Combats Influence Read online

  She knew what he was going to do.

  She kicked out at him, and the sharp toe of her shoe caught his ankle. He gasped. She pulled herself free, and tried to run towards the boards which spanned the gap between the barge and the bank. In a moment, he was after her. She heard him swear. She was still free, and could just make out the bank; but she was too far from the boards, and the only hope for her was to jump. She ran three paces, and then leapt – but before she actually left the ground, her feet were hooked from under her; so instead of jumping clear, she pitched forward. She saw stars and the pale light reflected on the water as it seemed to come up to meet her.

  She screamed.

  She heard sounds, not knowing what they were, except that there seemed to be a great roaring in her ears as she met the water.

  It was a uniformed man, whose beat included Duck’s Pool and who picked up the alarm from a police call-box, who reached the pool and saw Rachel plunge into the water. He saw the man, too, and knew that the man had pushed her in, but he decided quickly to try to save the girl and to let the man go. He stripped off his tunic and helmet, and dived in. As he did so, lights shone from the two lanes which led to the pool, and he knew that the first car-load of police had arrived. He went under the noisome water, came up, saw lights flashing on the surface, and one beam falling on the hair of the girl. He was near enough to grab her, and to keep her afloat until ropes were flung for him to grip. He heard shouting and thought he heard running footsteps, but his only worry was to keep the girl’s head above water.

  “She all right?” asked Gideon.

  “She will be. Frightened stiff at the moment.”

  “Get a doctor for her.”

  “One’s on the way.”

  “Good. Got the man?”

  “Yes. It was Syd Carter,” answered the detective inspector who had arrived with the first police car. “He won’t say much, but we can pick up Red and the rest of the bunch now. Bit of luck, that was. If Willis hadn’t noticed Syd Carter and the girl, we wouldn’t have found her until we’d dragged half the pools in the district.”

  It was part of that untidy pattern of London life; Baldy Lock, out of the country for nearly a year, had been caught when everyone had thought that he had got away for good. Baldy had come to see his wife – and because of his love for her this girl had been saved, and Syd Carter caught almost before the hunt had started. The girl owed her life to young Moss, of course, and Moss’s powers of observation weren’t luck.

  Gideon waited until the local police surgeon had come, confirmed that all the girl needed was rest, made sure that Christy would have her looked after, and then drove homewards. He called the Yard on the radio; nothing outstanding had happened, there was no need for him to go there. He drove home along the Embankment, feeling relaxed and relieved. It was always good when a hunt ended so quickly, and it was easy to forget how many did.

  But the Borgman hunt was not likely to end quickly, even if it really began.

  Was Kate right after all? Was he really wise to stick his neck out? Would he ever be able to find out why Nurse Kennett had left the country, and whom she had married – whether she had married at all. It might mean giving work to a dozen police forces, in England and abroad, all of them already heavily overworked. Even if a lot of morphine was found in the first Mrs Borgman’s grave, could he stand up in court on the evidence so far available, and be cross-examined by Percy Richmond?

  Could he even be sure that Borgman was guilty?

  He reached home, took the car to the garage just round the corner – it was a small garage, too narrow for backing in; even backing out in the mornings had its problems – and strolled in the pleasant evening to the house. No lights were on. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, Kate wouldn’t be back until nearly eleven, and the youngsters might be even later. It was hard to realise that they were all sufficiently grown up to be their own judges of the right time to get home. None of them overstepped the freedom which he and Kate gave them. Now there was luck: in their children.

  He and Kate had six in all, although they had lost one, very young. Tom was twenty-eight, married and an electrical research worker in the north. Prudence, at twenty-three, was married, too, but her Peter was proud that she was still a violinist with the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra. Plump, pretty Penelope was nearly seventeen, a promising pianist who would probably soon have to choose between marriage and a career. And there was Priscilla, the quiet one, soon to be twenty-one, without a boy-friend or any special bent, but in an almost guilty way Gideon had a particularly soft spot for her.

  There was Matthew, determined to be a policeman yet studying hard for his university scholarship, and young Malcolm, the ‘baby’, a boisterous fifteen, who gave no thought to anything but cricket, swimming, football and food.

  Yes, Gideon had a lot of cause for domestic satisfaction, and nearly everything was going well at the Yard, too. For once, it looked as if the police were pegging crime down: preventative methods were beginning to work. There had been some slight increase in the uniformed branch’s strength, which helped, and four out of five of the worst crooks were inside; unless a new bunch grew up in the next year or two, organised and professional crime was likely to be subdued perhaps for as long as five years – until the men now in jail began to come out. There would be the amateurs, the big and the little Borgmans, the wife murderers, the poisoners, the embezzlers, the hundreds and the thousands of people who became criminals more by accident of events than by intent.

  Which was true of Borgman?

  What should he do about this bête noire of his? The easiest thing would be to say to the Assistant Commissioner and Plumley, of the Legal Department, that he had come to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to justify an exhumation. They would shake their heads and say how sorry they were but they would be relieved, for all senior officials dreaded the possibility of the failure of a big prosecution.

  This might be the last chance of getting Borgman, though, and it remained a fact that if he got away with one wife murder, he might try another. His second wife was very wealthy in her own right.

  Kate came in first, bright-eyed, rested after enjoying the film, but wise enough not to say too much about it. Then Matthew arrived, dark-haired, big and bony, whistling the kind of tune that made Gideon suspect that there was a girl on his mind; and within minutes plump, fair-haired, merry-eyed Penny arrived. They crowded into the kitchen-dining-room, eating sandwiches, drinking coffee, talking about a dozen things but not once mentioning crime.

  Gideon gave crime hardly a thought when he got into bed beside Kate.

  That was about the time that Borgman was kissing his wife and saying how sorry he was that he had been kept so late at a dinner with an American agent; and then because it was on the top of his mind, he told Charlotte about the discovery that Ben Samuel had been swindling him.

  “What a nuisance, dear,” Charlotte said absently.

  Borgman thought, with clinical detachment: ‘I wonder if I would have married her if I’d known what a witless fool she was?’

  Chapter Five

  Argument

  Rogerson, the Assistant Commissioner, had been on sick leave for nearly seven months, and back in the office for two; he was looking bronzed and well, thinner than before the leave, and perhaps a little less inclined to leave everything to Gideon, who had acted as his deputy during those seven months, as well as handling his own job. Rogerson was a brisk, pleasant, friendly type; a good-natured man, a little self-conscious because he had been away so long. Plumley, of the Yard’s Legal Department and the chief liaison with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was an elderly man who knew practically every trick in the prosecution’s locker, and was an expert at picking out the flaws in a case; his motto was: “When in doubt let them get away with it.” He would put this into words, smiling as he did so, for he was an affable man whose geni
ality often concealed excessive caution.

  They met in the Assistant Commissioner’s office, just along the passage from Gideon’s, at ten o’clock.

  “Well, George,” Rogerson said, “I’ll bet you a pound I know what you’re going to recommend.”

  “So will I,” said Plumley.

  “Like me to write it on a piece of paper, and put it in a hat?” Gideon asked easily. “What’s your view, A.C.?”

  “I’m open to persuasion.”

  “More than I am,” said Plumley. “George, only a lunatic would go ahead against Borgman on the strength of this.” He rested a pink, well-manicured hand on a file of papers nearly two inches thick. “I’ve had everything checked and re-checked. If we could go to that Nurse Kennett, get a signed statement from her, and make sure we could put her in the box, I might be inclined to take a chance. But—”

  “Never known you take a chance yet,” Gideon rejoined.

  “Forgotten Fred Lee? Forgotten the Ditchburn case? We got two adverse verdicts, George.”

  “Nothing to do with taking chances,” Gideon retorted. “You didn’t prepare the cases properly.”

  “No use trying to needle me,” Plumley said, and looked as if he even relished the thrust. “A.C., don’t listen to him. He wants to go ahead with it regardless. I see from Appleby’s report—and he’s as shrewd a Yard lawyer as we’ve got—that he agrees with me. Borgman would get Richmond, and Richmond would tear this case to shreds. It wouldn’t get past the police court.”

  Gideon said mildly: “I’ve been about myself quite a bit, Plum.”

  “We can all make mistakes.”

  “That’s what I’m anxious about,” Gideon said. He felt as if he were arguing with one of his sons, when they were just beginning to feel old enough to differ from him; it did not exasperate him, but made him feel stubborn and set on his purpose. Plumley was equally set against the Borgman case and the more they argued the broader his smile would become, the nicer his tone, and the stiffer his opposition: at times he would become positively childish. Rogerson was really an unknown quantity; but if he said no, then Borgman could be forgotten unless new evidence was obtained, and Gideon had regained the feeling of urgency which he could not properly explain. “All this talk about not having a chance doesn’t ring a bell with me,” he went on. “We would have to prove murder, and could work two ways. In the first place there’s the accident, so-called, and—”

  “But that old woman said she was poisoned.”

  “The death certificate says that she died as a result of multiple injuries following a car accident,” said Gideon. “So that’s where we would start. We’ve some evidence that the brakes of her car had been tampered with; we know that a good lawyer could say that this was not with malicious intent, and that Borgman actually tried to improve the holding power of the brakes. The point we would need to prove was that he did tamper with them we can—”

  “Steady, George,” Plumley’s smile was very bright. “In the first place, how can we prove he himself touched the brakes? And in the second place, how could we prove malicious intent or intent to murder? That’s the weakness all along; there are too many ways in which Borgman can wriggle out.”

  “Mind listening for a minute?” asked Gideon, with a deliberate touch of asperity. “We checked his garage and the chauffeur-gardener he used to employ, and they swore they hadn’t adjusted the brakes, but expert witnesses said they had been adjusted.”

  “The same witness said there was a flaw in the metal of the brake-drums,” Plumley interpolated.

  “The point is, the brakes had been tampered with, and Borgman was pushed for money at the time. We won’t have any trouble in proving that. Then we have the fact that his wife was wealthy and the fact that she was three months gone. We know from the terms of her own inheritance that a large proportion of her money would have to go to her child or her children. We can show that if a child had been born, Borgman wouldn’t have been able to get anything like so much of her money. As it was, he got nearly half a million, the foundation of his fortune. There’s motive enough, and there’s the reason for the timing of the attempt.”

  “It could look good in a police court, I suppose,” Plumley said, grudgingly. “But once Richmond got on the job at the Assizes—”

  “Plum, there are times when I wonder if you think you’re talking to a lot of first-year recruits,” said Gideon heavily. “If ever there’s a job on which we’d have to use our big guns in the police court, this is it. We can only pull our surprises there; at the Assizes we’d be hamstrung. We need a definite plan of campaign—say, get the usual remand in custody at the first hearing, and be ready to put all our cards on the table at the second hearing, when they’d expect us to ask for another remand. Borgman will have to get Richmond in early to try to save himself from being sent for trial, anyhow. See what I mean?”

  “You’d stand or fall on the police court hearing, would you?” Plumley was thoughtful.

  “Yes. We’d work up the case on the accident, and have Richmond pulling out all the stops to demolish it. We’d say the brakes were fixed so as to cause an accident, although the motive is our weakness and Borgman’s strength. I think—we all think—that Borgman found the manufacturing flaw, made it worse, and was able to sit back and let the coroner blame the manufacturer. We’ll spend a lot of time on elaborating that, but won’t be able to prove it, and nearly everything we build up, Richmond will mow down.”

  “I won’t deny that,” interpolated Plumley.

  “When he’s made us look fools and put all the doubt he wants to in the mind of the magistrate, we’ll come up with the morphine angle,” Gideon went on equably. “We’ll do a hush-hush exhumation, get a secret report, put Bolting up. Bolting’s just the right pathologist to feed Richmond with when he thinks the case is going his way. We’ll try to get that nurse back in time, but if we can’t we’ll work in the old woman’s statement, which—”

  “It would never be admitted,” Plumley snapped.

  “We can bring it out when asking the doctor, who’ll testify whether he knew this nurse. I’ve told you we know we haven’t got a cut and dried case, so we’ve got to worry Borgman,” Gideon insisted. “This will worry him badly. We want—”

  “We don’t even know there will be a lot of morphine in the remains, but everyone knows there’ll be some,” Plumley argued. There was evidence of strain behind his smile. “I don’t want to appear unreasonable, George, and I agree that if we could get the Public Prosecutor to adopt these rather dubious tactics—”

  Gideon broke in angrily: “What the hell do you mean—dubious tactics? What’s the matter with you?—the man’s a killer, he may kill again, he’s in the right position for it. We want to get a committal for trial and a conviction—and we won’t get it by pussyfooting along as if we were scared of a Queen’s Counsellor. What’s the matter with you? Even if we lose the verdict and Borgman gets away with it, his present wife will be warned what to expect and he would never dare to try it again. That’s the worst that can come out of it. And you talk about dubious tactics because I want to get a guilty verdict on a murderer! If that’s the way you propose to advise the P.P.’s office, I might as well throw my hand in. I thought our job was to prevent crime as much as catch criminals.”

  Plumley had stopped smiling.

  Rogerson’s face was straight, but there was a twinkle in his eyes as he looked at Gideon, while Plumley stared down his plump nose.

  After a long pause, Plumley said: “Well, if we do go ahead and come a cropper, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I won’t oppose an exhumation order, if that’s what you’re really after for a start.”

  “If there’s not much morphine we can forget it,” said Rogerson. “If there is, we’ll advise the P.P. to go ahead. Agreed, Plum?”

  “Under protest,” Plumley said. “Where is she buried
?” He actually seemed to brighten up. “Or was she cremated? If Borgman really poisoned her, you’d think—”

  “Her will directed that she should be buried,” Gideon said. “She’s out at Maidenhead. Borgman’s flying to Paris tomorrow, and we can get everything done and the result known before he’s back. If we find nothing he can protest if he wants to, if we find what I expect to find it won’t matter what he does.”

  “Well, that’s all the time we need spend on that,” said Rogerson, as if with relief. “Now there’s the Tiny Bray murder. You’ve got Syd Carter up this morning on a charge of attempted murder of the girl Gully, haven’t you?”

  “Over in NE Court, yes,” said Gideon. “His brother will be in the same court, charged with the murder of Tiny Bray. There’s no problem. We need a formal eight-day remand, then we can put up some of the evidence and have them both committed. Right, Plum?”

  “For once I agree with you,” Plumley said.

  He was smiling, if a little tautly, when the conference broke up, just after eleven o’clock.

  That was the time when Ben Samuel was standing in Borgman’s office, white-faced, staring at Borgman as he lifted the telephone and said:

  “Get me Scotland Yard at once—the Criminal Investigation Department.”

  It was Gideon’s custom to go through all the cases being handled by his Department at least once a day, and to discuss the next move with the officers in charge, and, as often as not, with the Divisions. On conference mornings there was no time to do this, and he liked to leave it until the afternoon, although it was not so satisfactory, as many of the men whom he wanted to talk to would be out on the job. That morning, he made notes about what to do once the result of the exhumation was known, laid everything on with the Berkshire police, who would visit the cemetery after dark tonight, but keep the exhumation as quiet as they could. With great deliberation, trying to make sure that every step was absolutely sound, he prepared the opening stages of the case against John Borgman. Occasionally, an uneasy thought obtruded: what would he feel if Plumley were proved right, and there were not sufficient traces of morphia? But there was no need to dwell on that.