'You must be getting old,' she said and picked up the telephone.
'Oh, I wouldn't say that. Skirts are shorter than ever. I was often reminded of you.'
A dry, remote voice cut in on them. 'What is it?'
'Mr. Chavasse is here, Mr. Mallory.'
'Send him in. No calls for the next hour.'
She replaced the receiver and turned, a slight mocking smile on her mouth. 'Mr. Mallory will see you now, sir.'
'I love you too,' Chavasse said and he crossed to the green baize door, opened it and went in.
'Prison escapes have always been a problem,' Black said. 'They never average less than two hundred and fifty a year.'
'I must say that seems rather a lot.' Mallory helped himself to a Turkish cigarette from the box on his desk.
Although by nature a kindly man, as a Detective Chief Superintendent with the special Branch at New Scotland Yard, Charlie Black was accustomed to his inferiors running to heed his slightest command. Indeed, there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the sudden nervousness noted in even the most innocent of individuals when they discovered who and what he was. But we are all creatures of our environment, moulded by everything and anything that has happened to us since the day we were born and Black, branded by the years spent below stairs in the mansion in Belgrave Square where his mother, widowed by the first world war, had been cook, stirred uneasily in his chair for he was in the presence of what she, God rest her soul, would have termed his betters.
It was all there-the grey flannel suit, the Old Etonian Tie, the indefinable aura of authority. Ridiculous, but for the briefest of moments, he might have been a small boy again returning the old Lord's dog after a walk in the park and receiving a pat on the head and sixpence.
He pulled himself together quickly. 'It's not quite as bad as it looks. About a hundred and fifty men each year simply walk out of open prisons-nothing to stop them. I suppose you could argue that the selection procedure has been faulty in the first place. Another fifty are probably men released on parole for funerals and weddings and so on, who simply take off instead of coming back.'
'Which leaves you with a hard core of about fifty genuine escapes a year.'
'That's it-or was. During the past couple of years there's been an increase in the really spectacular sort of escape. I suppose it all started with Wilson the train robber's famous break from Birmingham. The first time a gang had actually broken into a prison to get someone out.'
'Real commando stuff.'
'And brilliantly executed.'
'Which is where this character the Baron comes in?'
Black nodded. 'To our certain knowledge he's been responsible for at least half a dozen big breaks during the past year or so. Added to that he runs an underground pipeline by which criminals in danger of arrest can flee the country. On two occasions we've managed to arrest minor members of his organisation-people who've passed on men we've been chasing to someone else.'
'Have you managed to squeeze anything out of them?'
'Not a thing-mainly because they honestly hadn't anything to say. The pipeline seems to be organised on the Communist cell system, the one Resistance used in France during the war. Each member is concerned only with his own particular task. He may know the next step along the route, but no more than that. It means that if one individual is caught, the organisation as a whole is still safe.'
'And doesn't anyone know who the Baron is?'
'The Ghost Squad have been trying to find out for more than a year now. They've got nowhere. One thing's certain-he isn't just another crook-he's something special. May even be a Continental.'
Mallory had a file open on the desk in front of him. He examined it in silence for a moment and shook his head. 'It looks to me as if your only hope of finding out anything about him at all would be to get a line on one of his future clients which in theory should be impossible. There must be something like sixty thousand men in gaol right now-how do you find out which one it is?'
'A simple process of elimination really. If there's a pattern to his activities it's to be found in his choice of clientele. They've all been long term prisoners and have had considerable financial resources.' Black opened a buff folder, took out a typed sheet of foolscap and a photo and passed them across. 'Have a look at the last one.'
Mallory examined it for a moment and nodded. 'Ben Hoffa-I remember this one. The affair on Dartmoor last month. A gang disguised as Royal Marine Commandos ambushed a prison vehicle during a military exercise and spirited him away. Any news of him since?'
'Not a word. Hoffa and two confederates, George Saxton and Harry Youngblood were serving sentences of twenty years apiece for the Peterfield Airport robbery. Do you remember it?'
'I can't say I do.'
'It was five years ago now. They hi-jacked a Northern Airways Dakota which was carrying just under a million pounds in old notes, a special consignment from the Central Scottish Bank to the Bank of England in London. A beautiful job. I have to admit that. Only the three of them involved and they got clean away.'
'What went wrong?'
'Hoffa had the wrong kind of girl friend. She decided she'd rather have the PS10,000 reward the Central Banks were offering than Ben and his share of the loot plus an uncertain future.'
'And the money was never recovered?'
'Not one farthing.' Black handed across another photo. 'That's George Saxton. He escaped from Grange End last year. It was a carbon copy of the Wilson affair. Half a dozen men broke-in under cover of darkness and actually brought him out. Not a word of him since then. As far as we're concerned he might as well have ceased to exist.'
'Which leaves Youngblood presumably?'
'Only just or I miss my guess,' Black said grimly and pushed another file across.
The face that stared up from the photo was full of intelligence and a restless animal vitality, one corner of the mouth lifted in a slight mocking smile. Mallory was immediately interested and quickly read through the details on the attached sheet.
Harry Youngblood was forty-two years of age and had joined the Navy in 1941 at the age of seventeen, finishing the war as a petty officer in motor torpedo boats. After the war he had continued in the same line of work, but on more unorthodox lines and in 1949 was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for smuggling. A charge of conspiracy to rob the mails had been dropped for lack of evidence in 1952. Between then and his final conviction in May 1961 he had served no further terms of imprisonment, but had been questioned by the police on no fewer than thirty-one occasions in connection with indictable offences.
'Quite a character,' Mallory said. 'He seems to have tried his hand at just about everything in the book.'
'To be honest with you, I always had a sneaking regard for him myself and I don't usually have much time for sentimentality where villains are concerned. If he'd taken another turning after the war instead of that smuggling caper, things might have been very different.'
'And now he's doing twenty years?'
'That's the theory. We're not too happy about what might happen considering the way his two confederates have gone. He's at Fridaythorpe now under maximum security, but there's a limit to how harshly he can be treated anyway. He had a slight stroke about three months ago.'
Mallory glanced at the photo again. 'I must say he looks healthy enough to me. Are you sure it was genuine?'
'An electroencephalograph can't lie,' Black said. 'And it definitely indicated severe disturbance to wave patterns in the brain. Another thing-you can apparently simulate a heart attack by using drugs, but not a stroke. He was very thoroughly checked. They had him in Manningham General Infirmary for three days.'
'Wasn't that dangerous? I should have thought it a perfect situation for someone to break him out.'
Black shook his head. 'He was unconscious most of the time. They had him in the enclosed ward with two prison officers at his side night and day.'
'Couldn't he be treated at the prison?'
'They haven't the facilities. Like most gaols, Fridaythorpe has a sick bay and a visiting doctor. Anything serious is treated in the enclosed ward of the local hospital. If a prisoner is likely to be ill for an extended period
