'Dynamite,' said Brady.
Marshall went back down the corridor to the hospital entrance. His sergeant, Hoskins, was waiting there, talking to a nurse, a pretty one. Hoskins was big and blond and easygoing and women seemed to rise out of the ground to meet him. He saw Marshall coming, and whispered to the nurse, who giggled and walked off in her brisk, rustling, rat-tat nurse's walk.
Hoskins said, 'Nurse Carr, sir. She put Mrs. Craig to bed.'
Marshall said, 'She's got nice legs too.' Hoskins grinned.
'Brady said Mrs. Craig may be out for days,' Marshall went on. 'Says he liked her husband. So did everybody else. He was a likable sort of a chap. Quiet, good at his job, good card player. Not the type that gets murdered. In fact Brady seemed surprised she wasn't the one who got it. Disappointed, too.'
'Who would kill her?' Hoskins asked.
'Craig would-according to Brady,' Marshall said. 'And Brady wouldn't have blamed him. Does Mrs. Craig drive?'
Hoskins nodded. 'She's got a current licence, anyway,' he said. 'But surely Craig wouldn't set up a booby trap like that and just forget about it?'
'No,' Marshall said. 'Not Craig. But she didn't have any motive to kill him, and no one else was there.' He sighed. 'So far there isn't any reason why anybody should have done anything. We've got to keep on going until we find one. Let's go and see Sir Geoffrey.'
The police Humber took them back into the town, past the housing estates and the fifteen-story flats, past the football ground, the dog track, the supermarket and bingo belt, into the old town of movie houses and dance halls and Edwardian pubs, and long, tight streets of houses all pushing their way to the docks. Then the docks themselves, disused coal staithes, and their first glimpse of the river, gray and broad and slow, and downriver the big ships waiting, the fishing boats and tugs tied up in rows, bobbing in unison like ducklings. This was where John Craig had worked, utilizing his mind and nerve and making money; quite a bit for himself, and vast sums for Sir Geoffrey Gunter, chairman of the Rose Line, now in need of a new manager.
The Rose Line's offices had been Sir Geoffrey's grandfather's house and offices combined, and now Sir Geoffrey had them preserved for him by a trust because the place had been designed by Dobson and Craig had had an idea for saving money. The house was big and deftly proportioned, more like London than Tyneside, as was its owner, Sir Geoffrey, a healthy, pink man in tweeds, deftly proportioned as his offices, and with the same air of being left over from a more spacious, more class-distinctive age. His very cigars seemed Edwardian, and he offered them with exactly the right air; a gentleman conferring a favor on a social inferior whom he wishes to put at his ease. It was unfair of Marshall to refuse, thought Hoskins. The old boy looked as though he'd been done out of a treat. He puffed out a cloud of Havana smoke, and deposited half a crown's worth of ash in a copper ashtray. He and Marshall sat in chairs of mahogany and black leather, and Sir Geoffrey faced them across a mahogany desk. To their right a bow window looked out to the river, the rattle of rivet hammers muted now to a gentle background noise. To be rich, thought Hoskins, was not necessarily to be a bastard, but it brought its own problems. Where was Sir Geoffrey going to find another Craig?
'In the Navy,' Sir Geoffrey was saying. 'He did very well during the war. He joined the firm in forty-seven. Of course he was very green, but he learned very quickly and I'm bound to say he's built up the business.'
In forty-seven, Hoskins remembered, there'd been a terrible shortage of shipping as of everything else, and the men who'd done well were the ones who'd got ships built first to replace the stuff lost in the war, men who'd been prepared to jump into it, shove and shout and threaten and bribe to get their ships on the slipway. Sir Geoffrey didn't look like that. There'd been fat pickings in the fifties, but afterwards the shipyards had caught up and there were far too many ships looking for cargoes and the threat of a slump was always in the air, like a fog. Hoskins remembered his father's stories of the last depression, of ships sailing from the Tyne with half a dozen master mariners in the focs'le. Things weren't as bad as that yet, but a man who could keep a cargo ship sailing now was a miracle worker, in a small way. Sir Geoffrey had never worked miracles, not even small ones.
'We concentrate on the Mediterranean mostly,' Sir Geoffrey was saying. 'That and the Baltic. Lot of small stuff, but if you can get it all in one cargo it does very nicely. Craig was very good at that. He had a lot of contacts, you know.'
'Where, sir?'
'All over the place. France, Italy, Spain, Greece, North Africa. Germany too. Very likable sort of chap. Then the Rose Line is reliable. Always has been. Once people come to us, they stick. He saw to that.'
'What did he do before forty-seven?' asked Marshall.
'Some sort of import and export. Did damn well at it too. He brought quite a bit of capital with him.'
'Where did he work?' asked Marshall.
'The Mediterranean mostly. That's where all his original contacts were,' Sir Geoffrey said.
'Tangier?'
'It's possible,' said Sir Geoffrey. Then he turned slowly, imperially purple.
'Now look here,' he said. 'Are you suggesting that an associate of mine was a smuggler?'
'He may have been,' Marshall said. 'If he was, it was a long time ago-but it may have given him enemies.'
Sir Geoffrey said stubbornly, 'He was a very decent fellow.'
'I'm sure he was,' said Marshall. 'Did he have any relatives?'
'No,' said Sir Geoffrey. 'Poor chap was an orphan. His wife had a brother, I believe.'
'Yes,' said Marshall. 'We're trying to trace him.'
'Bit of a bad lot, from what poor John told us,' said Sir Geoffrey. 'Work-shy sort of chap. Always borrowing.'
'Was Craig afraid of him?' Marshall asked.
'John wasn't afraid of anyone,' Sir Geoffrey said, and Marshall's eyes flicked up at him. The old man seemed so sure.
'Did he have any enemies that you, knew of?'
'No,' Sir Geoffrey said. 'Why should he? He was likable, I told you. One or two business rivals, of course. But dynamite! That doesn't happen in shipping, Inspector.'
'I realize that,' said Marshall gravely, 'but we've got to start somewhere. You tell me he was likable-yet I can't find one close friend. I can't find his wife's brother, either. If I'm going to find out who did it I need information. How much did you pay him?'
Sir Geoffrey huffed a bit and puffed a bit, but in the end he told, because what had happened was so terrible, and he wanted to help if he could.
'Five thousand a year,' he said. 'He had some shares too. But he earned it. He worked damn hard.'
They went into Craig's office and questioned his secretary, Miss Cross, and learned nothing except that she was in love with him, and he'd been too busy to notice. Methodically the two big men went through the desk, the filing cabinet, the safe. Contracts, manifests, and letters going back for a decade. Some of them were in German, some in French, and Marshall put them aside for the interpreter. They wouldn't tell him anything, he was sure, but he couldn't leave anything to chance. Miss Cross fussed a bit about opening the safe, but Hoskins used his wistful charm and she did it at last, to show them a series of ledgers, a hundred pounds in cash, and a handful of old snapshots. Craig in the Navy, as an ordinary seaman, as a leading hand, then as a petty officer in small boats, ramshackle affairs with an Arab look about them. By the end of the war, he was a full lieutenant, piratical in a stocking cap and dirty overalls, always in small boats, always with the hard sunlight of the Mediterranean as background.
'Special Boat Service,' said Marshall. 'A tough job. We'll have to get on to the Admiralty about this lot.'
Hoskins grunted, and dived into the safe once more. From the back of it he extracted a roll of black woven cloth, and let it unwind in his hands. It formed a long, thin line to the floor, and Hoskins wound it up again carefully, almost with reverence.
'Judo black belt,' he said.
'Is that good?' Marshall asked.
Hoskins nodded. 'Too good for me. The best there is.' He turned to Miss Cross. 'Have you seen this before?' She shook her head.
'I don't think it was Mr. Craig's,' she said. 'Why not?'
