to remember the old bloke may have been drunk or he may have been barmy. . . .”
“From what Ireland told me,” said Nayland Smith, “I don’t think either of those possibilities calls for consideration. Hello! Isn’t this where we get out?”
The driver pulled up on a street corner and the three alighted.
This street, lined with small suburban houses, so characteristic of the outlying parts of London, vividly recalled to Petrie the days when he had practised in this very district, and when his patients had inhabited just such houses. There was a considerable stream of traffic and at some points beyond it seemed to be badly congested.
P.C. Ireland was standing in the shadow of a wall which lined the street for twenty yards or so on one side, bordering the garden of a large house situated upon a corner facing the Common.
“Ah, there you are, Constable,” Gallaho said gruffly.
“Good evening,” said Sir Denis. “All luck comes your way in this case, Constable.”
“Yes, sir. It looks like it.”
“Repeat,” Smith directed tersely, “in your own words, what you told me on the telephone.”
“Very good, sir.” The man paused for a moment; then:
“There’s some cable-laying job going on at the comer of the lane there which cuts across the Common; a big hole in the road and a lot of drain pipes stacked up. When the gang ceased work this evening, and the night watchman came on, I thought there was likely to be a jam with the traffic, and so I stepped across and asked him to put another red lamp on this side to show where drivers should pull out. That’s how I got into conversation with him, sir. He’s a bit of a character and he said—I’m sticking as nearly as possible to his own words—if all coppers were human, it might be better for some of them. I asked him what he meant by that; but when he told me the story, which I thought it was my duty to report to you——”
“You were quite right,” snapped Nayland Smith.
“——I called up the inspector, and he told me to stand-by as you suggested, sir; there’s another man on my beat.”
“We’ll get the rest of the story from the night watchman,” growled Gallaho.
“He’s no friend of the Force, Inspector,” Ireland nodded. “He might talk more if you said you were newspaper men.”
“Bright lad!” growled Gallaho. He turned to Sir Denis. “Will you do the talking, sir?”
Nayland Smith nodded.
“Leave it to me.”
The hole in the road with its parapets of gravel and wood blocks protected by an outer defence of red poles from which lanterns were suspended, was certainly obstructing the traffic. But at the moment that the party of three reached it, a temporary clearance had been effected, and the night watchman surveyed an empty street.
His quarters, a sort of tarpaulin cave constructed amidst a mass of large iron piping, housed a plank seat and some other mysterious items of furniture. A fire in a brazier glowed redly in the darkness, and added additional colour to that already possessed by the night watchman.
This peculiar character, who favoured a short grey beard but no moustache—his upper lip appearing to possess a blue tinge in contrast to the redness of his nose—wore the most dilapidated bowler hat which Nayland Smith had ever seen in his life, and this at an angle which startled even Inspector Gallaho. He also wore two overcoats; the outer garment being several inches shorter than the inner.
He was engaged at the moment upon the task of frying bacon in the square lid of a biscuit tin which he manipulated very adroitly with a pair of enormous pincers, obviously designed for some much less delicate task. He looked up as the three men paused, leaning on one of the red poles.
“Upon my word!” Nayland Smith exclaimed, importing a faint trace of Cockney into his accent. “You blokes do get about, don’t you?” He turned to Gallaho. “Funny I should see this chap here, to-night. Last week I saw him down in Limehouse.”
“Did you, now?” said the watchman, evidently much gratified. “I’ll say that’s funny; I’ll say more, I’ll say it’s bloody funny!”
He removed the biscuit tin skilfully, and tipped the rashers with their succulent fat on to a cracked enamel plate. He produced a knife and fork and a great chunk of bread. Standing up, he set a kettle on the fire, then sat down again, and, the plate on the plank beside him, began very composedly to eat his supper.
“Yes, it is funny,” Nayland Smith went on. “I was down there for my paper on the story of that raid in Chinatown. But all the suspects slipped away. It would be last Saturday night, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” said the night watchman, his mouth full of hot bacon. “That would be the night.”
He dropped some tea into a tin pot, set it on the ground beside him, and continued stolidly to eat his bacon.
“A night wasted,” Nayland Smith mused aloud. “And what a night it was! What ho! The fog.”
“It certainly were foggy.”
“The blooming coppers had something up their sleeve; they kept it to themselves.”
“You’re right, mister.” He spat out a piece of bacon rind, picked it up, contemplated it critically and then threw it on the fire. “Coppers is a lousy lot!”
“Wish I’d stopped for a chat with you, that night, and a spot over the fire.” Nayland Smith leaned across the rail and passed a flask to the night watchman. “Slip a gill in your tea. I’m homeward bound with a couple of pals. I sha’n’t need it.”
“Blimey!” cried the night watchman, unscrewed the flask and sniffed the contents. “Thanks, mister. This is a bit of all right.”
“Those blasted chinks,” Sir Denis continued, “slipped out of that place as though they’d been dissolved,”
“How many, guv’nor?”
“Four, I think they were looking for.”
Mingled with the sound of whisky trickling into a tin mug, came a muted rumbling which examination of the face of the night watchman might have suggested to an observer to be due to suppressed mirth; then:
“You might have done worse than stop for a chat with me, guv’nor,” said the man, re-screwing the flask and returning it to Sir Denis.
CHAPTER 51
NIGHT WATCHMAN’S STORY
“It was this way with me,” the night watchman continued, endeavouring to chuckle and eat bacon at the same time, “as I told the young scab of a copper down there what come walkin’ by. He says ‘you’ve ‘ad one over the eight, haven’t you?’ he says. See what I mean, mister?”
“I know those young coppers,” snapped Nayland Smith, glancing at Gallaho. “They’ve got no sense.”
“Sense!” The night watchman made a strong brew of tea. “What I want to know is: how do they get into the Force? Answer me that: how do they get into the Force? Well, this bloke I’m tellin’ you about. . . .”
The dammed up stream of traffic was trickling slowly past the obstruction, under Constable Ireland’s direction. Things were going fairly well. But nevertheless it was difficult to hear the speaker, and Nayland Smith and Gallaho bent over the red barrier, listening intently. Petrie craned forward also, his hand resting on Gallaho’s shoulder.
“This bloke says to me,” the night watchman repeated, “‘ad one over the eight, haven’t you?” So I didn’t say no more to him, except, ‘Bloody bad luck to you if you ain’t’. That was what I said.”
With all the care of a pharmacist preparing a prescription, he added a portion of whisky from the tin cup to a brew of hot tea in a very cracked mug.
“I let him go—it’s silly talkin’ to coppers. He went away laughin’. But the laugh was mine, if I says so—but the laugh was mine! I’ll tell you what I told ‘im, mate—I told him what I see.”
He swallowed a portion of bread and bacon.
“You’re a newspaper man. Well, you’d have got your story all right, if you stopped, like you wanted to do, that night. What a story. Here it is. I work for a firm, if you follow what I mean; I ain’t a Council man—that’s why I travels so much. Very well. The same firm what done this job ‘ere was on the Limehouse job. . . .”
He added sugar and condensed milk from a tired looking tin to the brew in the mug, stirred it with a piece of wood and took an appreciative sip.
