Murder at aldwych statio.., p.24
Murder at Aldwych Station, page 24
‘Let’s hope he hasn’t had to use it,’ said Coburg as he made for the door.
DC Pritchard was still on watching duty at the corner of Wardour Mews when Coburg and Lampson pulled up in their car.
‘So far, so good,’ said Coburg. He gestured at the constable, who came hurrying over.
‘Any sign of Pat Riley?’ asked Coburg.
‘No, sir,’ said Pritchard. ‘He’s still in there. Three women left, though, about half an hour ago.’
‘The cleaners,’ said Lampson.
‘In that case, you can return the pistol to Sergeant Lampson,’ said Coburg.
Pritchard handed the pistol back to Lampson, who slipped it into his pocket.
‘Keep an eye on the car, Constable,’ said Coburg as he and Lampson got out of the car and made for the Riff Club. Coburg tapped his own pocket where the pistol he’d taken out from the weapons store felt heavy.
‘You’re sure we don’t need back-up?’ asked Lampson.
‘We’d need to arm them all, and there’s always a danger of someone getting shot by accident,’ said Coburg. ‘You said there was only Riley, this Len Peters, and the three cleaners in the place. With the cleaners out of the way, you and I should be able to deal with Riley and Peters.’
The door to the club was shut but unlocked. Coburg and Lampson made their way downstairs and found Len Peters carrying boxes of drinks to the shelves behind the bar.
‘Hello again,’ said Peters to Lampson. ‘Forgotten something?’
‘We need to have a word with Pat,’ said Lampson. ‘Is he in his office?’
At this, Peters looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ he said awkwardly.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Coburg.
‘Sometimes he nips out for a minute,’ said Peters.
‘We’ve got someone watching the door, and he reports that no one has left except the cleaners.’
At this, Peters looked really unhappy.
‘Sometimes he uses the rear entrance,’ he muttered.
‘What rear entrance?’ demanded Coburg.
‘Most people don’t know about it,’ said Peters. ‘I do, because he trusts me. And some of the other blokes do.’
‘Show me this rear entrance,’ said Coburg, doing his best to contain his anger. A rear entrance! Riley had been playing them for fools all this time!
Reluctantly, Peters led them into Riley’s office. At the back wall was a tall open cupboard whose shelves were filled with books and paper files. Peters gave the cupboard a push, and it rolled to one side to reveal an open doorway behind it.
Coburg pulled the pistol from his pocket and aimed it at the open doorway.
‘Walk,’ he snapped at Peters.
Peters looked at the pistol in Coburg’s hand in horror. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he protested.
‘Walk,’ repeated Coburg.
Peters stepped through the doorway and he must have pressed a switch, because lights came on in what was a low-ceiling, brick-walled tunnel. Peters began to walk into the tunnel, which twisted and turned a bit, before they reached a door, by which Peters hesitated.
‘Open it,’ ordered Coburg.
Peters pulled the door open, and they stepped into a storeroom in which boxes of coffee, tea and sugar were stacked. The smell of coffee permeated from upstairs.
‘Di Angelo’s,’ said Coburg as he realised where they were.
He waved the pistol at Peters and said, ‘Upstairs.’
Peters gave a sigh of resignation, then stepped out of the storeroom and began to mount the steps that led up to the coffee shop itself. Coburg slipped the pistol into his pocket, and he and Lampson followed Peters.
Peters opened a door at the top of the stairs and they found themselves behind the counter of the coffee shop. Julia di Angelo, who was at the coffee machine, looked at Peters in surprise.
‘Mr Peters?’ she said.
Then she saw the two police detectives behind him and her eyes widened and her mouth fell open in alarm.
‘Good morning,’ said Coburg.
Coburg and Lampson returned to Scotland Yard, taking Len Peters and Julia di Angelo with them. Once at the Yard, Coburg took di Angelo into one interview room, while Lampson took Peters into another.
‘Pat found that tunnel a couple of years ago, when he was having his office done up,’ said Peters. ‘He was having a storage cupboard put in, when the builder reported the space behind the wall was hollow. So the builder broke a hole in the wall to make like a doorway into it. Me and Pat then explored the tunnel. He took me with him because we’d both worked on the Kingsway tunnel, so we knew about tunnels. This tunnel wasn’t long, but it was old, and we found there was a doorway at the far end. The door was locked, but Pat got the builder to break in, and that’s when he found out it came out in the storeroom of Di Angelo’s coffee bar. While we were in there, Pietro di Angelo came down from the shop to see what all the noise was about and found us there. He was shocked because as far as he was concerned that door was permanently shut. He knew it went into a tunnel but he’d never explored it. There was no lighting in it then, just a dark passage. Pietro had decided to shut the door permanently to keep out rats from his storeroom. There are rats in every tunnel in London.
‘Even in those days, Pat had trouble with certain people. Dodgy people, as well as the police. With Wardour Mews being a dead end, if there was any trouble coming for him there was no way he could get out. So he suggested a deal to Pietro. He’d pay him so much a year if he allowed him to use the tunnel to go from the Riff Club and out through the coffee bar, if it was needed for any reason. Pat also said he’d have lighting put along the length of the tunnel with a switch at each end, so Pietro could use it to get to Pat’s end unseen, if he wanted to, and Pat could do the same from the club.
‘As far as Pietro was concerned, it was a good deal. He’d be getting money for something that he knew Pat would use only rarely, in an emergency, or something. And it also gave Pietro an escape route if things ever got nasty for him at the coffee bar. Don’t forget, there was a time when Italians weren’t popular with some people and Pietro had had threats.
‘So that was it. The tunnel was made good. After Pietro was taken away for internment, Pat and Pietro’s missus, Julia, kept the same deal. To be honest, it’s hardly been used, except for lately. When Pat realised he was being watched by your blokes, twenty-four hours a day, he’d use it to disappear for a bit.’
‘What did he do when he disappeared?’ asked Lampson.
‘I don’t know,’ said Peters. ‘I never enquired. It doesn’t do to ask questions.’
‘Does Riley have a gun?’
Peters hesitated before answering, ‘Yes. Most people in Soho have got a shooter of some sort. It’s that kind of area. There are some very dangerous people around. You never know when you’ll need to defend yourself.’
‘Have you got a gun?’
‘Me? No.’ This said very emphatically. ‘No one’s after me. I ain’t important.’
In the other interview room, Coburg listened as Julia di Angelo told him the same story about the discovery and renovation of the tunnel.
‘Pietro, my husband, wasn’t going to do it, but then these thugs arrived one day and started a fight in the coffee bar. It was all about protection. Pay us and your coffee bar won’t have any trouble. Don’t pay, and you will have trouble. They also threatened me and the kids we had working for us. That made Pietro think: at the moment it’s just fights, but he knew how dangerous these people were and it could get worse. He was worried they might turn up with guns or knives, and if they did the only way out was through the front door into the street. With the tunnel we could lock and bar the café door and then get away through Pat’s club. And Pat was going to pay for it. It wouldn’t cost us a penny. So Pietro said yes.’
She looked at Coburg and he could see the pain in her face as she said bitterly, ‘You know where he is? That prison camp at Ascot. Have you seen it? Barbed wire on the high fences, big lights, armed guards.’
‘Yes, I’ve been there,’ said Coburg.
He’d visited the internment camp a couple of months earlier when he needed to talk to one of the internees. The winter quarters for Bertram Mills Circus had been taken over by the government, the animals dispersed and a high double fence of barbed wite erected, along with machine gun posts and watchtowers. The area still had tents, but these were enormous canvas bell tents rather than the circus variety. The internees were housed in single-storey brick buildings divided into soulless dormitories. Thousands of Germans and Italians who had been living for many years in Britain had been rounded up and brought to the site as enemy aliens. Coburg knew that what Julia said was true: the vast majority of them had come to England as refugees from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, and now they were imprisoned alongside those few Germans who were Nazis, and those few Italians who supported Mussolini. The result was that most of the best Italian restaurants in London had had their chefs taken away, and London’s top hotels had lost their best waiters when the Germans and Italians had been taken away. The site at Ascot was just one of the many internment sites that had been set up. Coburg had been told that the one on the Isle of Man now had the best meals of anywhere in Britain, such was the number of Italian and German chefs who’d been sent there.
‘It is so cruel!’ Julia burst out angrily. ‘Pietro was never a fascist! He hates that kind of thing. That was why we came here to England. The land of the free,’ she said, her voice heavy with angry sarcasm.
‘How often did Pat Riley use the tunnels to come through your coffee shop?’ asked Coburg.
‘Until a week ago, hardly ever. And then he comes to me and tells me that the police are watching him. And not just the police, there are dangerous people also watching his club. He needs to use the tunnel to avoid them for his safety.’
‘How often?’ asked Coburg.
‘Two, three times a day,’ said Julia. ‘He would appear and go out into Berwick Street, and then come back an hour, maybe two, later. I didn’t keep a note of how often or for how long; it was none of my business.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Tuesday 10th December 1940
Coburg released Len Peters and Julia di Angelo, with a warning to both that he’d need to talk to them again so neither was allowed to leave London. When he and Lampson got back to their office, they found DC Pritchard waiting for them. Pritchard looked shamefaced.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘it never occurred to me he might have another way out.’
‘It never occurred to me either, Constable,’ said Coburg. ‘He fooled all of us.’
‘I’ve come to report that he’s gone. From his home, I mean. And his car’s not there.’
‘Do you have details of the car?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s a red Austin 7.’ He then gave them the registration number, which he obviously knew by heart, having spent so much time in the house opposite Riley’s house looking at it and the car parked outside it.
Coburg picked up the telephone and put out an alert for the car, and for Riley. ‘We’ll let you have a photo of Riley and his description straight away,’ he told the organiser of the search. ‘Sergeant Lampson will bring it to you for distribution.’
He hung up, and Lampson made for the door, saying, ‘I’m on it, guv.’ Lampson added to the unhappy-looking DC Pritchard, ‘You come along with me, Constable. Think of it as another bit of learning about police procedural action.’
They had barely gone, when Coburg’s phone rang. It was Jack Harkness from Vice.
‘You wanted to know if we had anything on Lord Cuddington,’ he said.
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Coburg. He picked up a pencil. ‘What have you got?’
‘Nothing on Lord Cuddington, but there’s gossip about his wife, Lady Pamela.’
‘What about?’
‘Male prostitutes, gigolos, whatever you like to call them. And drugs.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Yeh. She hangs around with some shady characters. Including a gangster called Shelley Buttons.’ Harkness chuckled. ‘The word is that you had Shelley Buttons lifted and put away.’
‘I did.’
He laughed. ‘I’d like to have seen his face. We wanted to move on him because we heard what was going on at his clubs, but we were warned off. Top-level government stuff. “Stay away from Shelley Buttons. The man knows some important people.”’
‘Yes, so I gather.’
‘I also heard that you’d had Lady C arrested for murder,’ said Harkness.
‘Yes,’ said Coburg. ‘Where did you hear about it?’
‘You know what this place is like,’ chuckled Harkness. ‘Gossip spreads faster than rabies. I even heard that your missus had shot down a German bomber. Now that one can’t be right, surely?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Coburg. ‘But one thing is that you might be able to help us with: we’ve put out an alert for Pat Riley.’
‘The owner of the Riff Club?’
‘Yes. He’s wanted for the murder of five people.’
‘Five?! This is the same Pat Riley we’re talking about? Mr Friendly, smiles all the time? Never causes any trouble?’
‘That’s him,’ said Coburg.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Harkness. ‘Of all the club owners in Soho, he’s the last one I’d have thought of as being a killer. And a serial killer, to boot!’
‘I guess that’s how he’s got away with it,’ said Coburg.
He hung up, and looked at the phone, considering whether to telephone Rosa and tell her the news, then thought against it. He decided to concentrate his energies on finding Riley. The fact he’d taken his car meant that he was definitely on the run. The thing now was to find out if Riley had contacts outside London, people he could run to. Coburg needed to delve into Riley’s record, find out what other places apart from London he’d lived. He got up and headed for the office where the files on all those with a criminal record were kept.
Pat Riley pulled the car to a halt in the shadow of the high brick wall that surrounded the vast estate of Dawlish Hall. Aware that the police would most likely have circulated details of his red Austin 7, along with its registration number, he’d left the Austin in the garage of an old friend and exchanged it for a pale blue Triumph Dolomite. It had taken him what seemed like hours of scouring the country roads to find the place because all the direction signs had been removed in an attempt to foil the Germans if they invaded. Finally, he’d gone into the shop in the small village of Dawlish and asked the way to the Hall. The woman behind the counter had looked at him quizzically, then asked: ‘What do you want them for?’
What is it about country people? Riley thought in annoyance. He forced a smile and said, ‘I have something to deliver there.’
This seemed to satisfy the woman, who then gave him directions, which seemed to involve various crossroads and places that used to exist but weren’t there any longer: ‘Then you turn left at what used to be Abbott’s Farm but is now just a tumbledown old cottage with an old apple tree in front of it,’ was just one example.
Finally, Riley thanked her and left, doing his best to keep the puzzling directions in his head as he drove out of the village in what he hoped was the right direction. By driving slowly and remembering everything the woman in the shop had told him, he finally found the high brick wall.
He parked on the grass verge, took a pair of binoculars from his car and climbed onto the bonnet, supporting himself against the top of the wall while he aimed the binoculars at the large white mansion. He wondered how many people were inside it. A house that big would need a large staff.
He tried to remember what he’d read in the papers about Coburg’s family. Coburg’s eldest brother, Magnus, was the Earl of Dawlish.
Riley knew he was taking a gamble. It was known that Rosa had left London after the attempt on her, but no one in London appeared to know where she’d gone. It was only Riley’s guess that she’d come here, but it made sense. Far from London and the bombing, and with the protection of Coburg’s brother and his staff. The question was: would he be able to find her in a place as large as this? She could be anywhere.
And then, unbelievably, he saw her. She came out of the main entrance to the house and was walking towards a paddock where an elderly horse grazed. In her hand she held what looked like an apple.
Riley dropped down from the car bonnet and hurriedly climbed back into his car, started it up, and then drove on the road beside the high wall until he came to the two tall stone pillars with a statue of a winged horse atop each. The gates were open, and Riley drove in and made for the paddock and Rosa, pulling up beside her just before she reached the paddock and the horse.
‘Rosa!’ he called cheerily.
Rosa looked at him in surprise. ‘Pat! What are you doing here?’
‘Edgar sent me. He asked me to take you back to London.’
Rosa looked at him suspiciously.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘He’ll tell you that himself,’ said Pat with what he hoped was a friendly grin. ‘Come on, hop in.’
She shook her head.
‘I’d better phone him first,’ she said.
She was about to walk away, when she saw the pistol that had appeared in his hand and which he was aiming at her.
‘Get in the car,’ he said, and now all friendliness had vanished from him.
‘But …’ began Rosa.
‘Get in the car,’ snapped Riley, ‘or I’ll shoot you here and now.’
Rosa threw a look towards the house, wondering where Magnus and Malcolm were.
‘In the car!’ barked Riley, angry now, and he pushed the passenger door open.
Reluctantly, Rosa got into the passenger seat.
‘I can drive one-handed,’ said Riley, ‘so don’t try anything or this pistol will punch a very big hole in that pretty head of yours.’
With that, he started the car up and drove along the drive and out through the gates, pulling up on the grass verge after a few hundred yards. He reached to the back seat and produced two short lengths of rope, which he dropped in her lap.
