A man in his middle-twenties at most, straw-coloured hair sticking up as if neither combed nor brushed that morning, was sitting back in the armchair watching smoke curl upwards from the cigarette in his knuckly hand. His face was very pale and his eyes enormous-and he was quivering: almost as if he were an addict himself and was badly in need of a shot.
He sprang up.
“Mr. Gideon!”
“ ‘Morning,” Gideon said gruffly.
“Mr. Gideon, I — I-can only say I’m desperately sorry! I wouldn’t have touched it, but my wife isn’t well and — and I’m doing so badly at the shop.” He deplored his own excuse at once. “God knows I know I shouldn’t have touched it! But I did feel I could control the — the people who bought from me. And I had a — deal in hand to get rid of the filthy stuff. I — oh, God, get it back, sir! Get it back! If the thief starts on a new round, God knows how many will suffer.”
It would have been easy to say: “You should have thought of this before.” Instead, Gideon said: “We’ll get it back, but we’ll need your help.”
“I’ll do anything — anything I can!”
Gideon looked at Hobbs, and asked: “Is Mr. Charlesworth in, do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Take Mr. Beckett along to him, and make sure Mr. Charlesworth has all the assistance he needs.”
“I will,” said Hobbs.
“I’m sorry — bothering you, sir,” Beckett muttered. “But I knew you would do all you could — I knew you would! I’ve -I’ve a cousin on the Force, sir, and he -he absolutely swears by you. You will get the stuff back, won’t you?”
“I’ll be greatly surprised if we don’t, and very soon,” Gideon assured him. He glanced at Hobbs and motioned slightly towards the communicating door, and Hobbs nodded almost imperceptibly in return: he would be straight back as soon as he had finished with Beckett.
As he strode back into his own office, Gideon wondered how it was possible that a man who knew so much about heroin could contemplate making money by selling it illegally, and wondered why Beckett’s attitude had changed so much? He was suddenly and much more vividly aware of just what a danger the stolen stuff represented.
Two pounds of it! And a tenth of a grain could make an addict-half a grain a week keep him happy, by rotting his body and his mind. Gideon was suddenly possessed of the same sense of urgency as Beckett had shown.
Who had the stuff now?
“How much have you got?” a man demanded.
“Enough,” said the sharp-featured chemist’s assistant who had stolen the heroin from Beckett.
“Can you keep up a supply?”
“I can keep it up. Can you keep paying?”
“I can pay.”
“Who are your customers?” demanded the assistant.
‘‘You’d certainly like to know!”
“I want to be sure I get my money. Who are they, Jenks? I don’t want to know their names — I just want to know how well they’ll pay.”
The man named Jenks — thin, middle-aged, with a strangely pale complexion and a slight cast in one of his almost colourless grey eyes — put a hand to his pocket and brought out a bulging wallet. He took out a wad of notes and thrust them into the young chemist’s hands.
“There’s plenty more,” he said flatly. “Plenty more! I’ve got a market in a school — a private school. Don’t worry about your money. What they can’t find themselves, their wealthy families will pay. No one wants scandal, do they?”
Very slowly and deliberately, the young chemist counted the money — in all, nineteen ten pound notes — nodded, and turned away.
CHAPTER NINE
Chief Inspector William Bligh was in the strong-room at Madderton’s Bank when he had the recall message: “Report to the Deputy Commander at once.”
The moment he read it, Bligh’s heart dropped like a stone. He had been called out early and assigned to this investigation, and his first thought had been that the great men were giving him another chance: Madderton’s, one of the few remaining private banks with its headquarters in the West End, was an influential one. The raid was bound to get a lot of publicity and if he could pull off a quick result, that could only benefit him.
Bligh was moody, these days; not far from being depressed -partly because he did not like being alone so much. He missed his wife much more than he would have imagined: had he known exactly how he would feel, he would probably not have agreed to a divorce so quickly. He now believed that his marriage had not been on the rocks, but merely, going through the doldrums, and he would have given a lot to know how she was getting on with her new husband. The second reason was the frequency with which, these days, cases he was investigating went sour on him. Every man at the Yard had bad patches; but this had lasted for nearly two years, and of late he had been given few assignments of any consequence.
Madderton’s had seemed his great chance. Moreover, within ten minutes of reaching the bank, which was near Piccadilly, off St. James’s Palace, he had been fairly sure who had committed the raid. Dynamite, the way furniture was piled up as a protection against flying debris, entrance forced by use of a key probably supplied by a watchman — it was a classic Chipper Lee job. Bligh had been so elated that he had nearly telephoned a report
