‘Scotland Yard.’
Now that he’d got to know Peebles a little better, Victor Leeming no longer felt the same antipathy towards him. His dog-like willingness was still irritating but it was balanced by some excellent qualities. Peebles was brave, determined and inquisitive. Conscious of his deficiencies, he was always trying to repair them by firing an endless series of questions at his senior colleagues. He learnt quickly and was invariably grateful for advice. Leeming slowly warmed to him.
‘Is this what being a detective means?’ asked Peebles. ‘Yesterday we charged up to Manchester and pounded the streets in search of the father of a suspect. Today we’re stuck here in Scotland Yard.’
‘We have to wait until we have evidence of their whereabouts,’ said Leeming. ‘It’s different from being a policeman on the beat. When you see a crime being committed there, you can wade in at once and arrest the culprit. You respond immediately to a given situation.’
Peebles grinned. ‘Aye, I’ve done that often enough.’
‘Things sometimes move more slowly here. We’re involved in a cat-and-mouse game, so we have to be patient. As soon as the villains make a mistake – and they usually do – we spring into action. Have no fears, Constable, there’ll be time to use those fists of yours again. Meanwhile, we have to rely on our brains.’
Colbeck had given the two men the use of his office and left them all the information pertaining to Jeremy Oxley and Irene Adnam that he could gather. They studied the sheets of paper and put them in chronological order. Most of the records related to Oxley but his accomplice had not been idle. Three different members of polite society in Manchester had been deceived into taking her on as a governess and each time she’d done a moonlight flit with a substantial haul. Ambrose Holte had been her first trusting employer. For each of her subsequent appointments, Irene had used other names. Thanks to Inspector Boone, who had provided the information, they had some indication of the way in which she operated. What was not clear from the collection of papers was when Oxley and Irene had started to work together.
‘The problem is that Miss Adnam has never been caught,’ said Leeming, ‘so we have no details of an arrest. Jeremy Oxley, on the other hand, has been arrested twice but never convicted. On both occasions, he managed to escape. I think we both know how.’
‘Money changed hands,’ observed Peebles.
‘It’s one of the things that really makes me mad. Rich people are the most difficult to convict. No matter how black their crimes, they can buy their way out of trouble. Oxley must have made a small fortune over the years. He’ll always be able to offer a juicy bribe.’
‘That’s a crime in itself, Sergeant.’
‘Only to those who recognise it as such,’ said Leeming. ‘I’m afraid that a certain constable in Wolverhampton let his greed take precedence over his duty. The five pounds he accepted was the price of a prisoner’s escape. Now that they have him locked up, they’ll make him suffer and he thoroughly deserves it.’
‘There is a pattern here,’ noted Peebles, separating out some sheets of paper. ‘These offences here all relate to Oxley. He either inveigles his way into people’s confidence before robbing them, or he uses an accomplice to distract someone so that he can grab what he wants.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘I just wish that we had more detail in these records. We ought to know more about the people we arrest.’
‘Inspector Colbeck thinks the day will come when we actually have photographs of villains. Think what a help that would be.’
‘It will happen eventually,’ said Peebles, ‘though it may take some time yet. So far nobody has invented the sort of camera that we can use on a regular basis to photograph criminals. It’s a pity. I’d dearly love to see a photograph of Irene Adnam.’
‘I want to see one of Jeremy Oxley as well.’
‘You’ll have to wait until you meet him in the flesh.’
‘He’s the real criminal,’ asserted Leeming. ‘Women are the fairer sex. They don’t usually have the urge to kill in cold blood. Most of them would be too afraid even to hold a gun, let alone fire it.
Peebles picked up two sheets of paper and compared them.
‘The wonder is that we have so much information about him,’ he remarked. ‘Many of the crimes didn’t even take place in London. How did they come to our attention?’
‘The inspector made sure that they did.’
‘He’s been after Oxley for a long time, hasn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Leeming. ‘Every time the name has cropped up, Inspector Colbeck has made a note of it. Sometimes, of course, Oxley takes on a new identity as he befriends a victim before robbing him. The inspector can always spot if he is the culprit because the man works in a particular way. There’s a phrase for it.’
‘Modus operandi.’
‘Yes – that’s it.’
‘When criminals find a method that works, they stick to it.’
‘There’s another side to that. It’s a question of superstition. They do everything in exactly the same way because they’re afraid to fail if they don’t. We all have superstitions of one kind or another. I know that I do. My wife teases me about some of them.’
‘Coming back to Oxley,’ said Peebles, ‘why has the inspector singled him out for special attention?’
‘It’s because of something that happened years ago before he even joined the Metropolitan Police Force. Oxley killed someone who was going to act as a witness against him in court. The crime has preyed on the inspector’s mind ever since,’ said Leeming. ‘He felt that he was in some way to blame. It’s what drives him on to catch Oxley. He wants to avenge the death of a young lady called Helen Millington.’
Edward Tallis loathed the gentlemen of the press with a passion that never dimmed but Colbeck took a more tolerant view of them. What irked him was that newspapers either praised him to the skies or excoriated him for his mistakes or for what they wrongly perceived as his slowness. There seemed to be no middle ground between applause and condemnation, no recognition of the fact that crimes could not be solved to satisfy the deadlines of editors and that progress was being made on a case even if it was not apparent to the jaundiced eye of reporters. To the superintendent, the handful of men he’d reluctantly invited into his office that day were unprincipled scribblers who’d been put on this earth solely in order to bait him. In Colbeck’s view, by contrast, they were a vital tool in the fight against crime if they were used correctly. The problem was that neither he nor his superior had any control over what they actually wrote.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said Tallis, looking truculently around his guests as if ready to challenge one of them to a fight. ‘I know that you prefer to deal in wild sensation but I must ask you to take a less hysterical approach to an investigation for once.’
‘This is a sensational crime, Superintendent,’ argued one of the men. ‘We have a shooting, a daring escape and two policemen sliced to pieces beneath the wheels of a train. You cannot expect us to report that as an everyday event.’
‘All I ask is that you report the known facts instead of giving the impression that we are unequal to the task of finding the culprits.’
The man was blunt. ‘We write what we see.’
Colbeck winced. Before the press conference was called, he’d urged Tallis to make sure that he did not antagonise them at the very start, yet that was exactly what his superior had just done. The superintendent’s tone became more belligerent and insults from both sides were soon flying around the room like so many angry wasps. Colbeck tried to rise above the fray and let his mind settle on an aspect of the case that was unknown to any of the journalists.
The fate of Helen Millington continued to preoccupy him. He felt very sorry for the jeweller who’d been Oxley’s first victim and had never forgotten the man’s bravery in trying to pursue a thief. He’d also been deeply shocked by the recent murders of the two Wolverhampton policemen. The difference between them and Helen was that their occupation exposed them to risk and they had understood that when they put on the uniform. Not that either of them could ever have expected to suffer such a hideous end. Serious injuries were common among all constabularies but killings were thankfully rare.
