Graveyard to hell, p.16
Graveyard to Hell, page 16
24
It was almost 6 a.m. when Jean Fleming opened the side gate and went into the school yard. In the grey light of early morning, the fog had receded, but rain still hammered down as relentlessly as ever, drifting in a curtain before the wind.
She ran into the porch, searching for her key with one hand, a carton of milk in the other and a newspaper tucked under one arm. She finally got the door open and paused, a slight frown on her face. Someone was playing the piano in the music room.
Nick was tired, more tired than he had ever known. It had been a long night and now the Graveyard Shift was ending. He glanced up as Jean opened the door. She placed the carton of milk and the newspaper on top of a desk, untied the damp scarf which had covered her head and ran her fingers through her dark hair as she came forward.
She was wearing her heavy sheepskin coat, Cossack boots and a hand-tailored tweed skirt, and stood so close that he only had to reach out to touch her. He wondered whether this ever happened more than once in a lifetime? This strange blend of love and desire and the flesh that was almost physical in its pain.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, continuing to play. ‘More beautiful than I ever believed a woman could look at this hour in the morning. Did you manage to get some sleep?’
‘Not really. I was waiting for you.’
‘But I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it before the end of my shift.’
‘Are you finished now?’
He looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘Not quite. Ten minutes to go.’
She smiled. ‘You’ve come to have breakfast with me?’
He shook his head. ‘No, Jean, I’ve come to take you downtown.’
‘Downtown?’ The smile was still there, but the eyes had frozen hard. ‘To Police Headquarters you mean?’
‘That’s right. I’m arresting you for the murder of Ben Garvald.’
And she didn’t try to deny it, that was the strange thing. She stood there looking at him, somehow completely detached, outside of all this, the sallow peasant face quite composed.
Nick stopped playing. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, pushed one in his mouth and searched for matches. He found them, lit his cigarette and coughed as smoke caught at the back of his throat.
‘May I have one?’
He pushed the packet along the top of the piano and gave her a light. She inhaled deeply and looked down at him, quite calm.
‘Hadn’t you better get on with it?’
‘All right.’ He started to play again, his hands moving slowly over the keys, a progression of quiet, sad chords that were autumn and winter rolled into one. ‘One or two things about this business had been nagging away at me all night. The letter, for example. The one Ben was supposed to have sent to Bella.’
‘Supposed?’
‘He had to go and see Chuck Lazer to find out who she’d married, never mind where she lived. How in the hell could he have written to her? I suppose you helped yourself to a little prison notepaper when you last saw him? Easy enough. There’s always a supply on hand in the Visiting Room.’
‘You’d have difficulty in proving that.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He took a folded sheet of blue notepaper from his wallet and laid it down on top of the piano. Printed at the top was the legend:
In replying to this letter, please write on the envelope:
Number .......................................................................
Name ...........................................................................
........................................................................... Prison
This side of the sheet was blank. When he turned it over, Jean Fleming’s name and telephone number were written on the other side in her own hand. He produced Ben’s letter written on the same notepaper and placed it beside the other.
Jean sighed. ‘That was rather careless of me.’
It was the ease with which she accepted it, her ice-cold calm that horrified him. ‘This is all pretty circumstantial, Nick. I’d need a reason.’
‘You had one. Ben had to be stopped from ever returning here because once he found there was no money waiting for him, you couldn’t be sure how he would react. You checked on his release date, then forged the letter.’
‘To frighten Bella?’
‘Only partly. You wanted something to show Harry Faulkner. You knew he’d arrange things. A show of force, perhaps, that would frighten Ben away. You made a mistake there. Ben Garvald wasn’t the sort of man to be frightened by anything. You came to us just to make it look good.’
‘You’ve been to Bella.’
He nodded. ‘Once I told her how much I’d worked out for myself, she soon came across with the rest. She even told me about the divorce. How Ben suggested she go through with it as a blind to allay any possible suspicion by the police that she just might have that money.’
‘Did she tell you she was Ben’s driver when he pulled the Steel Amalgamated job?’
‘You were her alibi. You swore to the police that she hadn’t been out of the house all night and, afterwards, blackmailed her. You put the screws on your own sister. She knew that all you had to do was open your mouth and she’d get five years.’
‘I needed that money,’ she said calmly.
‘I realize that now,’ he said. ‘Four years at University. Did you really work as a barmaid at nights, by the way? And then there was this place. You said you were paying Miss Van Heflin a percentage of your profits each year. You didn’t tell me you gave her a down payment of three thousand pounds. She did. I hauled her out of bed and spoke to her on the phone half an hour ago. A nice old girl. She hopes you haven’t done anything wrong, by the way.’
Her iron composure cracked and she slammed a fist down hard on top of the piano. ‘I had to get out of Khyber Street, Nick. You can understand that? I had to.’
‘And what about Ben?’
‘He was going to spoil everything. If he’d had some sense, if he’d stayed away, none of this would have happened.’
‘Bella told me how you arranged things. That if Ben turned up she was to give him a phoney story about the money being hidden on board a boat she was supposed to have moored at Hagen’s Wharf. You asked her to bring the gun for protection only. You were going to bribe Ben to go away. That’s what you told her.’
Jean shrugged. ‘Poor Bella, she could never really handle anything when the going got rough. I had to do it all for her, even when I was a kid. You’ll never find the gun, you know.’
‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll run a nitrate test on your hands. That’ll show whether you’ve fired a gun recently. And the mud on that wharf – a lab analysis of the dirt on your boots should tie in pretty closely. Then there’s your car. If it was parked for long in the alley outside the wharf, we can prove that, too.’ He shook his head. ‘You never stood a chance.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘You know what your biggest mistake was? You told me you hated Ben, that from the age of fourteen on, he wouldn’t leave you alone.’ Nick shook his head. ‘If there was one thing I learned during the past eight hours, it was this. Where women were concerned, Ben Garvald was the original gentleman. He’d have cut off his right hand before he’d have harmed a fourteen-year-old kid.’
‘I wanted him,’ Jean said simply. ‘Do you know that? I used to lie in bed nights and burn for him and he never laid a finger on me.’
He got to his feet, dropping his cigarette to the floor, and she moved in close, hands sliding around his neck, breasts pushing hard against him.
‘Nobody needs to know, Nick. You could handle it somehow, I know you could.’
‘If I wanted to,’ he said slowly. ‘And there’s the rub. To use the words of a man who was worth a dozen of you any day, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot barge pole, angel.’
She cracked completely, fingers hooked, clawing at his eyes. As he grabbed her wrists, the language came bursting out like a dam overflowing. All the filth of Khyber Street, the gutter years, pushed down, hidden away in some dark corner of the mind, now rising to the surface.
Grant came through the door, moving with incredible speed for a man of his weight, a constable at his shoulder. He caught her wrists, pulling her away. ‘All right, lad, I’ll take her.’
The constable took her other arm and she went through the door between them, looking over her shoulder, face twisted with hate, the stream of filth never ending, fading across the yard into the rain.
He stood staring into space, feeling for a cigarette mechanically. He placed it in his mouth and a match flared. He turned, looked into the dark, tortured face of Chuck Lazer for a moment, then leaned to the light.
‘A long night, General.’
Nick didn’t reply. He walked out of the room, passed along the corridor and stood in the porch, staring out at the driving rain.
‘A long night,’ he repeated slowly.
‘Look, I know how you feel,’ Chuck Lazer said awkwardly. ‘But she’s a woman after all. They’ll go easy on her.’
‘Go easy on her?’ Nick turned, eyes burning in the white face and all the anger, the self-loathing, the frustrated passion seemed to erupt from his mouth in a single sentence.
‘God damn her, I hope they hang the bitch.’
BOOK TWO
BROUGHT IN DEAD
For Dorothy Limón – a real fan
1
The girl was young and might have been pretty once, but not now. Her right eye was almost closed, the cheek mottled by livid bruises and her lips had been split by the same violent blow that had knocked out three teeth.
She hobbled painfully into the Line-Up room supported by a woman P.C., a pathetic, broken figure with a blanket over her shoulders to conceal the torn dress. Miller and Brady were sitting on a bench at the far end of the room and Brady saw her first. He tapped his companion on the shoulder and Miller stubbed out his cigarette and went to meet her.
He paused, noting her condition with a sort of clinical detachment, and the girl shrank back slightly from the strange young man with the white face and the eyes that seemed to stare right through her like dark glass.
Detective Sergeant Nicholas Miller was tired – more tired than he had been in a long, long time. In the ten hours he had already spent on duty, he had served as investigating officer at two burglaries, a factory break-in and a closing-hours brawl outside a pub near the market in which a youth had been slashed so badly across the face that it was more than likely that he would lose his right eye. This had been followed almost immediately by a particularly vile case of child cruelty which had involved forcible entry, in company with an N.S.P.C.C. inspector, of a house near the docks where they had found three children huddled together like animals, almost naked, showing all the signs of advanced malnutrition, squatting in their own dirt in a windowless boxroom that stank like a pigsty.
And now this. Compassion did not come easily at five o’clock on a dark February morning, but there was fear on this girl’s face and she had suffered enough. He smiled and his whole personality seemed to change and the warmth reached out to envelop her so that sudden, involuntary tears sprang to her eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be all over.’ He turned to Detective Constable Brady. ‘Let’s have them, Jack.’
Brady nodded and pressed a red button on a small control panel on the wall. A hard white light illuminated a stage at the far end of the room and a moment later, a door opened and half a dozen men filed in followed by two constables who marshalled them in line.
Miller took the girl gently by the arm, but before he could speak, she started to tremble violently. She managed to raise her right hand, pointing at the prisoner who stood number one in line, a great ox of a man, his right cheek disfigured by a jagged scar. She tried to speak, something rattled in her throat and she collapsed against Miller in a dead faint.
He held her close against his chest and looked up at the stage. ‘Okay, Macek, let’s be having you.’
A thick-set, fourteen-stone Irishman with fists like rocks, Detective Constable Jack Brady had been a policeman for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of dealing with human wickedness in all its forms, of walking daily in squalor and filth and a gradual erosion of the spirit had left him harsh and embittered, a hard, cruel man who believed in nothing. And then a curious thing had happened. Certain villains now serving collectively some twenty-five years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons had thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg in two places and fracturing his skull, later leaving him for dead in a back street.
Most men would have died, but not Jack Brady. The priest was called, the last rites administered and then the surgeons took over and the nurses and physiotherapists, and in three months he was back on duty with a barely perceptible limp in his left leg.
The same, but not the same. For one thing he was noticed to smile more readily. He was still a good tough cop, but now he seemed gifted with a new understanding. It was as if through suffering himself, he had learned compassion for others.
The girl painfully signed her name at the bottom of the typed statement sheet and he helped her to her feet and nodded to the woman P.C.
‘You’ll be all right now, love. It’s all over.’
The girl left, sobbing quietly, and Miller came in holding a teletype flimsy. ‘Don’t waste too much sympathy on her, Jack. I’ve just heard from C.R.O. She’s got a record. Four previous convictions including larceny, conspiracy to steal, breaking and entering and illegal possession of drugs. To cap that little lot, she’s been on the trot from Peterhill Remand Home since November last year.’ He dropped the flimsy on the table in disgust. ‘We can certainly pick them.’
‘That still doesn’t excuse what Macek did to her,’ Brady said. ‘Underneath that surface toughness she’s just a frightened little girl.’
‘Sweetness and light.’ Miller said. ‘That’s all I need.’ He yawned, reaching for a cigarette. The packet was empty and he crumpled it with a sigh. ‘It’s been a long night.’
Brady nodded, applying a match to the bowl of his pipe. ‘Soon be over.’
The door opened and Macek entered, escorted by a young probationer constable. The Pole slumped down on one of the hard wooden chairs at the table and Miller turned to the probationer.
‘I could do with some tea and a packet of cigarettes. See what the canteen can offer, will you?’
The young constable went on his way briskly, for Miller was a particular hero of his – Nick Miller, the man with the law degree who had made Detective Sergeant with only five years’ service. All this and an interest, so it was rumoured, in his brother’s business that enabled him to live in a style to which few police officers were accustomed.
As the door closed, Miller turned to Macek. ‘Now then, you bastard, let’s get down to it.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ Macek said woodenly.
Brady laughed harshly and there was a heavy silence. Macek looked furtively at Miller, who was examining his fingernails, and said desperately, ‘All right, so I knocked her around a little. Bloody little tart. She had it coming.’
‘Why?’ Brady demanded.
‘I took her in,’ Macek said. ‘Gave her a place to stay. The best of everything. Then I find her sneaking out at two in the morning with my wallet, my watch and everything else of value she could lay her hands on. What would you have done?’
He sounded genuinely aggrieved and Miller picked up the girl’s statement. ‘She says here that you’ve been living together for five weeks.’
Macek nodded eagerly. ‘I gave her the best – the best there was.’
‘What about the men?’
‘What men?’
‘The men you brought round to the house every night. The men who called because they needed a woman.’
‘Do me a favour,’ Macek said. ‘Do I look like a pimp?’
‘Don’t press me to answer that,’ Miller told him.
‘You’ve kept the girl under lock and key for the past two weeks. When she couldn’t take any more, you beat her up and threw her out.’
‘You try proving that.’
‘I don’t need to. You said you’ve been living together as man and wife.’
‘So what? It’s a free country.’
‘She’s just fifteen.’
Macek’s face turned grey. ‘She can’t be.’
‘Oh, yes she can. We’ve got her record card.’
Macek turned desperately to Brady. ‘She didn’t tell me.’
‘It’s a hard cruel world, isn’t it, Macek?’ Brady said.
The Pole seemed to pull himself together. ‘I want a lawyer.’
‘Are you going to make a statement?’ Miller asked.
Macek glared across the table. ‘You get stuffed,’ he said viciously.
Miller nodded. ‘All right, Jack, take him down and book him. Make it abduction of a minor and rape. With any luck and his record, we might get him seven years.’
Macek sat there staring at him, horror in his eyes, and Jack Brady’s iron fist descended, jerking from the chair. ‘On your way, soldier.’
Macek stumbled from the room and Miller turned to the window and pulled the curtain. Rain drifted across the glass in a fine spray and beyond, the first light of morning streaked the grey sky. The door opened behind him and the young probationer entered, the tea and cigarettes on a tray. ‘That’ll be six bob, sarge.’
Miller paid him and slipped the cigarettes into his pocket. ‘I’ve changed my mind about tea. You have it. I’m going home. Tell Detective Constable Brady I’ll ’phone him this afternoon.’
He walked along the quiet corridor, descended three flights of marble stairs and went out through the swing doors of the portico at the front of the Town Hall. His car was parked at the bottom of the steps with several others, a green Mini-Cooper, and he paused beside it to light a cigarette.
It was exactly five-thirty and the streets were strangely empty in the grey morning. The sensible thing to do was to go home to bed and yet he felt strangely restless. It was as if the city lay waiting for him and obeying a strange, irrational impulse he turned up the collar of his dark blue Swedish trenchcoat against the rain and started across the square.
It was almost 6 a.m. when Jean Fleming opened the side gate and went into the school yard. In the grey light of early morning, the fog had receded, but rain still hammered down as relentlessly as ever, drifting in a curtain before the wind.
She ran into the porch, searching for her key with one hand, a carton of milk in the other and a newspaper tucked under one arm. She finally got the door open and paused, a slight frown on her face. Someone was playing the piano in the music room.
Nick was tired, more tired than he had ever known. It had been a long night and now the Graveyard Shift was ending. He glanced up as Jean opened the door. She placed the carton of milk and the newspaper on top of a desk, untied the damp scarf which had covered her head and ran her fingers through her dark hair as she came forward.
She was wearing her heavy sheepskin coat, Cossack boots and a hand-tailored tweed skirt, and stood so close that he only had to reach out to touch her. He wondered whether this ever happened more than once in a lifetime? This strange blend of love and desire and the flesh that was almost physical in its pain.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, continuing to play. ‘More beautiful than I ever believed a woman could look at this hour in the morning. Did you manage to get some sleep?’
‘Not really. I was waiting for you.’
‘But I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it before the end of my shift.’
‘Are you finished now?’
He looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘Not quite. Ten minutes to go.’
She smiled. ‘You’ve come to have breakfast with me?’
He shook his head. ‘No, Jean, I’ve come to take you downtown.’
‘Downtown?’ The smile was still there, but the eyes had frozen hard. ‘To Police Headquarters you mean?’
‘That’s right. I’m arresting you for the murder of Ben Garvald.’
And she didn’t try to deny it, that was the strange thing. She stood there looking at him, somehow completely detached, outside of all this, the sallow peasant face quite composed.
Nick stopped playing. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, pushed one in his mouth and searched for matches. He found them, lit his cigarette and coughed as smoke caught at the back of his throat.
‘May I have one?’
He pushed the packet along the top of the piano and gave her a light. She inhaled deeply and looked down at him, quite calm.
‘Hadn’t you better get on with it?’
‘All right.’ He started to play again, his hands moving slowly over the keys, a progression of quiet, sad chords that were autumn and winter rolled into one. ‘One or two things about this business had been nagging away at me all night. The letter, for example. The one Ben was supposed to have sent to Bella.’
‘Supposed?’
‘He had to go and see Chuck Lazer to find out who she’d married, never mind where she lived. How in the hell could he have written to her? I suppose you helped yourself to a little prison notepaper when you last saw him? Easy enough. There’s always a supply on hand in the Visiting Room.’
‘You’d have difficulty in proving that.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He took a folded sheet of blue notepaper from his wallet and laid it down on top of the piano. Printed at the top was the legend:
In replying to this letter, please write on the envelope:
Number .......................................................................
Name ...........................................................................
........................................................................... Prison
This side of the sheet was blank. When he turned it over, Jean Fleming’s name and telephone number were written on the other side in her own hand. He produced Ben’s letter written on the same notepaper and placed it beside the other.
Jean sighed. ‘That was rather careless of me.’
It was the ease with which she accepted it, her ice-cold calm that horrified him. ‘This is all pretty circumstantial, Nick. I’d need a reason.’
‘You had one. Ben had to be stopped from ever returning here because once he found there was no money waiting for him, you couldn’t be sure how he would react. You checked on his release date, then forged the letter.’
‘To frighten Bella?’
‘Only partly. You wanted something to show Harry Faulkner. You knew he’d arrange things. A show of force, perhaps, that would frighten Ben away. You made a mistake there. Ben Garvald wasn’t the sort of man to be frightened by anything. You came to us just to make it look good.’
‘You’ve been to Bella.’
He nodded. ‘Once I told her how much I’d worked out for myself, she soon came across with the rest. She even told me about the divorce. How Ben suggested she go through with it as a blind to allay any possible suspicion by the police that she just might have that money.’
‘Did she tell you she was Ben’s driver when he pulled the Steel Amalgamated job?’
‘You were her alibi. You swore to the police that she hadn’t been out of the house all night and, afterwards, blackmailed her. You put the screws on your own sister. She knew that all you had to do was open your mouth and she’d get five years.’
‘I needed that money,’ she said calmly.
‘I realize that now,’ he said. ‘Four years at University. Did you really work as a barmaid at nights, by the way? And then there was this place. You said you were paying Miss Van Heflin a percentage of your profits each year. You didn’t tell me you gave her a down payment of three thousand pounds. She did. I hauled her out of bed and spoke to her on the phone half an hour ago. A nice old girl. She hopes you haven’t done anything wrong, by the way.’
Her iron composure cracked and she slammed a fist down hard on top of the piano. ‘I had to get out of Khyber Street, Nick. You can understand that? I had to.’
‘And what about Ben?’
‘He was going to spoil everything. If he’d had some sense, if he’d stayed away, none of this would have happened.’
‘Bella told me how you arranged things. That if Ben turned up she was to give him a phoney story about the money being hidden on board a boat she was supposed to have moored at Hagen’s Wharf. You asked her to bring the gun for protection only. You were going to bribe Ben to go away. That’s what you told her.’
Jean shrugged. ‘Poor Bella, she could never really handle anything when the going got rough. I had to do it all for her, even when I was a kid. You’ll never find the gun, you know.’
‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll run a nitrate test on your hands. That’ll show whether you’ve fired a gun recently. And the mud on that wharf – a lab analysis of the dirt on your boots should tie in pretty closely. Then there’s your car. If it was parked for long in the alley outside the wharf, we can prove that, too.’ He shook his head. ‘You never stood a chance.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘You know what your biggest mistake was? You told me you hated Ben, that from the age of fourteen on, he wouldn’t leave you alone.’ Nick shook his head. ‘If there was one thing I learned during the past eight hours, it was this. Where women were concerned, Ben Garvald was the original gentleman. He’d have cut off his right hand before he’d have harmed a fourteen-year-old kid.’
‘I wanted him,’ Jean said simply. ‘Do you know that? I used to lie in bed nights and burn for him and he never laid a finger on me.’
He got to his feet, dropping his cigarette to the floor, and she moved in close, hands sliding around his neck, breasts pushing hard against him.
‘Nobody needs to know, Nick. You could handle it somehow, I know you could.’
‘If I wanted to,’ he said slowly. ‘And there’s the rub. To use the words of a man who was worth a dozen of you any day, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot barge pole, angel.’
She cracked completely, fingers hooked, clawing at his eyes. As he grabbed her wrists, the language came bursting out like a dam overflowing. All the filth of Khyber Street, the gutter years, pushed down, hidden away in some dark corner of the mind, now rising to the surface.
Grant came through the door, moving with incredible speed for a man of his weight, a constable at his shoulder. He caught her wrists, pulling her away. ‘All right, lad, I’ll take her.’
The constable took her other arm and she went through the door between them, looking over her shoulder, face twisted with hate, the stream of filth never ending, fading across the yard into the rain.
He stood staring into space, feeling for a cigarette mechanically. He placed it in his mouth and a match flared. He turned, looked into the dark, tortured face of Chuck Lazer for a moment, then leaned to the light.
‘A long night, General.’
Nick didn’t reply. He walked out of the room, passed along the corridor and stood in the porch, staring out at the driving rain.
‘A long night,’ he repeated slowly.
‘Look, I know how you feel,’ Chuck Lazer said awkwardly. ‘But she’s a woman after all. They’ll go easy on her.’
‘Go easy on her?’ Nick turned, eyes burning in the white face and all the anger, the self-loathing, the frustrated passion seemed to erupt from his mouth in a single sentence.
‘God damn her, I hope they hang the bitch.’
BOOK TWO
BROUGHT IN DEAD
For Dorothy Limón – a real fan
1
The girl was young and might have been pretty once, but not now. Her right eye was almost closed, the cheek mottled by livid bruises and her lips had been split by the same violent blow that had knocked out three teeth.
She hobbled painfully into the Line-Up room supported by a woman P.C., a pathetic, broken figure with a blanket over her shoulders to conceal the torn dress. Miller and Brady were sitting on a bench at the far end of the room and Brady saw her first. He tapped his companion on the shoulder and Miller stubbed out his cigarette and went to meet her.
He paused, noting her condition with a sort of clinical detachment, and the girl shrank back slightly from the strange young man with the white face and the eyes that seemed to stare right through her like dark glass.
Detective Sergeant Nicholas Miller was tired – more tired than he had been in a long, long time. In the ten hours he had already spent on duty, he had served as investigating officer at two burglaries, a factory break-in and a closing-hours brawl outside a pub near the market in which a youth had been slashed so badly across the face that it was more than likely that he would lose his right eye. This had been followed almost immediately by a particularly vile case of child cruelty which had involved forcible entry, in company with an N.S.P.C.C. inspector, of a house near the docks where they had found three children huddled together like animals, almost naked, showing all the signs of advanced malnutrition, squatting in their own dirt in a windowless boxroom that stank like a pigsty.
And now this. Compassion did not come easily at five o’clock on a dark February morning, but there was fear on this girl’s face and she had suffered enough. He smiled and his whole personality seemed to change and the warmth reached out to envelop her so that sudden, involuntary tears sprang to her eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be all over.’ He turned to Detective Constable Brady. ‘Let’s have them, Jack.’
Brady nodded and pressed a red button on a small control panel on the wall. A hard white light illuminated a stage at the far end of the room and a moment later, a door opened and half a dozen men filed in followed by two constables who marshalled them in line.
Miller took the girl gently by the arm, but before he could speak, she started to tremble violently. She managed to raise her right hand, pointing at the prisoner who stood number one in line, a great ox of a man, his right cheek disfigured by a jagged scar. She tried to speak, something rattled in her throat and she collapsed against Miller in a dead faint.
He held her close against his chest and looked up at the stage. ‘Okay, Macek, let’s be having you.’
A thick-set, fourteen-stone Irishman with fists like rocks, Detective Constable Jack Brady had been a policeman for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of dealing with human wickedness in all its forms, of walking daily in squalor and filth and a gradual erosion of the spirit had left him harsh and embittered, a hard, cruel man who believed in nothing. And then a curious thing had happened. Certain villains now serving collectively some twenty-five years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons had thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg in two places and fracturing his skull, later leaving him for dead in a back street.
Most men would have died, but not Jack Brady. The priest was called, the last rites administered and then the surgeons took over and the nurses and physiotherapists, and in three months he was back on duty with a barely perceptible limp in his left leg.
The same, but not the same. For one thing he was noticed to smile more readily. He was still a good tough cop, but now he seemed gifted with a new understanding. It was as if through suffering himself, he had learned compassion for others.
The girl painfully signed her name at the bottom of the typed statement sheet and he helped her to her feet and nodded to the woman P.C.
‘You’ll be all right now, love. It’s all over.’
The girl left, sobbing quietly, and Miller came in holding a teletype flimsy. ‘Don’t waste too much sympathy on her, Jack. I’ve just heard from C.R.O. She’s got a record. Four previous convictions including larceny, conspiracy to steal, breaking and entering and illegal possession of drugs. To cap that little lot, she’s been on the trot from Peterhill Remand Home since November last year.’ He dropped the flimsy on the table in disgust. ‘We can certainly pick them.’
‘That still doesn’t excuse what Macek did to her,’ Brady said. ‘Underneath that surface toughness she’s just a frightened little girl.’
‘Sweetness and light.’ Miller said. ‘That’s all I need.’ He yawned, reaching for a cigarette. The packet was empty and he crumpled it with a sigh. ‘It’s been a long night.’
Brady nodded, applying a match to the bowl of his pipe. ‘Soon be over.’
The door opened and Macek entered, escorted by a young probationer constable. The Pole slumped down on one of the hard wooden chairs at the table and Miller turned to the probationer.
‘I could do with some tea and a packet of cigarettes. See what the canteen can offer, will you?’
The young constable went on his way briskly, for Miller was a particular hero of his – Nick Miller, the man with the law degree who had made Detective Sergeant with only five years’ service. All this and an interest, so it was rumoured, in his brother’s business that enabled him to live in a style to which few police officers were accustomed.
As the door closed, Miller turned to Macek. ‘Now then, you bastard, let’s get down to it.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ Macek said woodenly.
Brady laughed harshly and there was a heavy silence. Macek looked furtively at Miller, who was examining his fingernails, and said desperately, ‘All right, so I knocked her around a little. Bloody little tart. She had it coming.’
‘Why?’ Brady demanded.
‘I took her in,’ Macek said. ‘Gave her a place to stay. The best of everything. Then I find her sneaking out at two in the morning with my wallet, my watch and everything else of value she could lay her hands on. What would you have done?’
He sounded genuinely aggrieved and Miller picked up the girl’s statement. ‘She says here that you’ve been living together for five weeks.’
Macek nodded eagerly. ‘I gave her the best – the best there was.’
‘What about the men?’
‘What men?’
‘The men you brought round to the house every night. The men who called because they needed a woman.’
‘Do me a favour,’ Macek said. ‘Do I look like a pimp?’
‘Don’t press me to answer that,’ Miller told him.
‘You’ve kept the girl under lock and key for the past two weeks. When she couldn’t take any more, you beat her up and threw her out.’
‘You try proving that.’
‘I don’t need to. You said you’ve been living together as man and wife.’
‘So what? It’s a free country.’
‘She’s just fifteen.’
Macek’s face turned grey. ‘She can’t be.’
‘Oh, yes she can. We’ve got her record card.’
Macek turned desperately to Brady. ‘She didn’t tell me.’
‘It’s a hard cruel world, isn’t it, Macek?’ Brady said.
The Pole seemed to pull himself together. ‘I want a lawyer.’
‘Are you going to make a statement?’ Miller asked.
Macek glared across the table. ‘You get stuffed,’ he said viciously.
Miller nodded. ‘All right, Jack, take him down and book him. Make it abduction of a minor and rape. With any luck and his record, we might get him seven years.’
Macek sat there staring at him, horror in his eyes, and Jack Brady’s iron fist descended, jerking from the chair. ‘On your way, soldier.’
Macek stumbled from the room and Miller turned to the window and pulled the curtain. Rain drifted across the glass in a fine spray and beyond, the first light of morning streaked the grey sky. The door opened behind him and the young probationer entered, the tea and cigarettes on a tray. ‘That’ll be six bob, sarge.’
Miller paid him and slipped the cigarettes into his pocket. ‘I’ve changed my mind about tea. You have it. I’m going home. Tell Detective Constable Brady I’ll ’phone him this afternoon.’
He walked along the quiet corridor, descended three flights of marble stairs and went out through the swing doors of the portico at the front of the Town Hall. His car was parked at the bottom of the steps with several others, a green Mini-Cooper, and he paused beside it to light a cigarette.
It was exactly five-thirty and the streets were strangely empty in the grey morning. The sensible thing to do was to go home to bed and yet he felt strangely restless. It was as if the city lay waiting for him and obeying a strange, irrational impulse he turned up the collar of his dark blue Swedish trenchcoat against the rain and started across the square.
