Czytaj książkę: «Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery»

Chapter One

Nothing ever happens in Harkdale on a Friday afternoon.

The black Wolseley cruised along the deserted country road because it was part of the schedule. Showing the police car in Harkdale each afternoon was like showing the flag in the outposts of empire, a symbol for the inhabitants that they were being looked after. Police Constable Newby drove through the flat midland countryside without seeing the potato fields or the pine woods; he didn’t speak to PC Felton beside him. Newby was a town man and only the smoke and the factory skyline seven miles behind them was real. He thought of becoming a sergeant and recited pages of Moriarty’s Police Law to himself to pass the time. There was nothing else to do.

‘There’s a lorry over there in the lay-by,’ said Felton.

Lay-by? He made it sound like the motorway to London. Newby reflected that it was odd for a man called Moriarty to write their basic textbook: Moriarty, the archfiend of Sherlock Holmes. For a bored few seconds he pursued the idea that the archfiend had written it all wrong to throw the law into confusion.

‘Pull up, Bob,’ said Felton. ‘He might need help.’

‘Who might?’

‘The lorry driver, of course.’

Harry Felton would think of something like that! He was a born country copper, doomed to remain a PC all his life. He told people the time and helped old ladies across the road. The schoolkids in all these outlying villages called him Harry. He was a little undynamic for Bob Newby’s taste. The police car screeched to a halt.

‘So ask him if he needs help,’ sighed PC Bob Newby.

He watched his colleague go over to the lorry. ‘Joseph Carter & Co.’ the legend on the side of the lorry proclaimed. While somebody underneath it was tinkering with the works a fox terrier guarded the dismantled rear wheel. The hub and various parts of the wheel were scattered over the grass verge.

‘Hello, Jackson,’ said the policeman as he bent down to pat the dog. The dog, Jackson, wagged its tail. ‘Are you having trouble?’ Even the damned dogs, Bob Newby realised, knew Harry Felton. ‘Where’s your villain of a master?’

The dog’s master looked a villain to PC Newby, but then most people did to PC Newby. The lorry driver didn’t look, apart from the way he was dressed, like a lorry driver. He looked an intelligent young man, but he had longish hair; his attitude as he stood up beside the lorry was slightly supercilious. He looked like the kind of student who gets arrested on demonstrations.

‘Hello, Gavin,’ PC Felton said. ‘Fancy seeing you.’

‘Enjoying a spot of lunch,’ said the young man with a glance at his watch. Then he spoke to the dog: ‘We enjoyed our scampi and avocado pear, didn’t we, Jackson?’

The dog leaped up at its master as PC Newby strolled across to join them. ‘You look as if you’re in trouble, mate,’ Newby said, making it sound slightly ambiguous. But Gavin Renson accepted the edge of menace cheerfully.

‘I’m always in trouble, aren’t I, Harry?’

Felton nodded amiably. ‘How long have you been working for Carter’s?’

‘Just over a week.’

‘Ah, temporary, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Gavin Renson agreed with a laugh, ‘bloody temporary. Look at the lorry they gave me.’

Newby sniffed irritably. As a policeman he knew what he liked, and he didn’t like Gavin Renson. ‘Is there anything we can do for you?’ he asked.

‘Well, that’s kind of you. Yes, I think I need a new job. But a nice soft cushy job this time.’

‘A job like mine, I take it?’ Newby snapped.

‘Well, you said it!’

Gavin Renson clearly preferred policemen who gave him the feed lines. He looked disappointed when Harry Felton intervened with a diplomatic, ‘I doubt whether we’ve a uniform that would fit your lanky figure. And Jackson isn’t a standard sized police dog. Too short, and he has small feet.’

Newby watched angrily while Gavin Renson conferred with his dog about mixing with all those undesirable Alsatians.

‘Do Carter’s know about this breakdown?’ he asked sharply.

‘Yes, I’ve been on the blower. They’re sending someone –’

‘Okay, so there’s nothing we can do.’ Newby turned away. ‘Come on, Harry,’ he called.

They drove away through the flat countryside. A Cortina passed them going in the opposite direction and Newby wondered incredulously what business a man could have in Harkdale. The tiny town had gradually appeared on the horizon while Harry Felton was talking. It was a farm town and once a week, on Fridays, it came to something like life, when the farmers brought in their wares to market. Even that was a dying tradition, Newby thought, thank God.

‘It was only boy’s stuff. Stealing lead off a church roof, I think, nothing serious. He got caught because he took the dog with him. But these things stick in a small town, so he never lasts long in a regular job. He’s known as a wide boy. The last job he had was with Kimber’s in Banbury.’

‘The estate agents?’ Newby asked absently.

‘That’s right. He was there nearly six months. I gather he did quite well at the beginning, but eventually they had to get rid of him.’ Harry Felton laughed. ‘It was the usual story. He would insist on having the dog with him all the time!’

Newby grinned. ‘Why does he call it Jackson?’

‘I don’t know.’ Felton shrugged. ‘It’s always been called Jackson.’

They had reached Harkdale and were driving through the main street. There was a Woolworths, a new supermarket, and a number of bay windowed shops selling afternoon tea, women’s clothes, and an old established firm of solicitors. Outside the bank there was a Ford Zephyr and a small knot of people were watching three men coming out of the building. Just as deserted as always, Newby thought, six people and two cars in the whole High Street. The three men coming out of the bank were carrying guns and their faces were covered by nylon stockings.

‘Good God, Harry! Look at that!’

The tallest man was wearing a suede jacket and grey flannel trousers. He was carrying a large leather bag.

‘What’s going on?’ Harry asked in amazement as the bell started ringing inside the bank.

The bell was a signal for the slow motion scene to erupt. The small knot of people watching suddenly scattered. It was real, and they were in danger. A frantic clerk came running, shouting and waving his arms, from the bank. The tall man tossed the bag into the car, then turned and shot the clerk.

‘Let’s move,’ grunted Newby.

Harry Felton accelerated across the street and swung the police car across to block their escape. He came to a halt with his front wheels on the pavement. Newby could hear two women screaming as he reached for his radio telephone, and a man was shouting, ‘Don’t be a fool!’ Felton leaped out of the car.

The three bank robbers were in the Zephyr and it was backing wildly to turn and make its escape. Harry Felton ran into the road but it drove straight at him. He threw himself clear at the last moment. By the time he had regained his feet the Zephyr had finished its three-point turn.

The next two seconds passed very slowly for PC Newby. He watched Harry Felton put out a hand to seize the passenger door, and the tall bank robber leaned out of the window, carefully pointed his gun at Harry’s stomach, and fired three times. Harry Felton toppled balletically onto the road, twitched twice and then lay still. As Newby knelt beside him the Zephyr sped off through the deserted High Street.

Newby wished the bloody alarm bell would stop ringing. But it brought out a few more people as soon as the street was safe. A doctor appeared and pushed his way through the sightseers to attend the bank clerk. Harry Felton was dead. Newby went across to the doctor.

‘Have you radioed for an ambulance?’ the doctor asked.

‘That’s what I was doing while my mate was getting killed.’

The doctor nodded. ‘This one will live.’

The bank clerk was conscious and babbling with the pain from his shoulder. The blood from his clawing hands mingled with tears so that his face became streaked with red and dirt. The manager of the bank had emerged at last to demand that somebody should do something.

‘Get after them,’ he blustered at Newby. ‘They’ve stolen nearly fifty thousand pounds!’

Newby glared. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get them.’ He turned and went back to Harry Felton’s body, before he could say anything he might regret. He could hear the siren of a police car in the distance, a black Jaguar doing what seemed to be ninety miles an hour. Within seconds it had skidded to a stop beside Newby.

Police Constable Brooks slid from the driving seat as it stopped. ‘How much start have they had?’ he asked.

‘A minute or so,’ murmured Newby.

PC Brooks looked down at the dead policeman. ‘We’ll catch up with them.’ He put a hand on Newby’s shoulder. ‘Harry was a good lad.’

‘Harry Felton was a fool and he got on my nerves but he was the nicest guy in the world.’

‘Leave it to me,’ said Brooks.

He slipped back into the car, slammed the door and turned the ignition key all in the same movement, leaving PC Newby standing forlorn by the dead man. His speedometer was flickering around ninety again within fifteen seconds. He was a fast driver, and Bill Stanton sat next to him with his eyes closed. When they reached the open road and accelerated to a hundred and twenty miles an hour Stanton’s lips began moving in prayer.

‘Harry Felton was a nice bloke,’ Brooks said bitterly. ‘He never harmed anyone.’

‘Concentrate on the road,’ Stanton muttered.

‘I’m going as fast as I can.’

‘I know.’

Constable Horace Brooks was a dark, determined man in his late thirties. He had steel nerves and his list of commendations for bravery was almost as long as the list of cars he had crashed in the line of duty. Promotion had escaped him because he conducted his own one-man crusade against crime and police discipline. Only his charm and an engaging record of success had kept him in the force.

‘There she is,’ he said grimly. ‘About three miles in front.’

Far away in the grey distance a Ford Zephyr was going too fast and throwing up a cloud of dust.

‘We’ll be there before they hit town.’

Brooks glanced out of the corner of his eye at a lorry parked in the lay-by. A man and a dog were standing watching them go by, and then in his driving mirror Brooks saw the man climb with the dog into his driving cabin.

‘Look where you’re going,’ said Stanton. ‘The road starts winding soon.’

‘I can see.’

They were gaining rapidly on the Zephyr but Brooks didn’t dare let up; once the Zephyr reached town it would be a much simpler matter to double back through the busy streets and lose them. The two cars raced along the gradually winding road, tyres screaming and back wheels slithering into the verge.

‘Thank God for the winding road,’ Brooks called. ‘They won’t be able to use their guns on us now.’

‘God help us,’ muttered Stanton.

There was a farm on their right, and several seconds before the crash Brooks saw what was going to happen. A tractor was coming out of the fields; almost immediately he lost sight of it behind the farmhouse, and then as they sped past the farmhouse and round the corner Brooks saw the tractor lurch into the road. The Ford Zephyr skidded nearly twenty yards before hitting the tractor with a bang that sounded like an atomic explosion. The tractor disintegrated and came to rest in a muddle of twisted metal in the opposite ditch. The Ford Zephyr spun on until it hit a tree.

‘God help us.’

Brooks had slowed down. He manoeuvred the car perilously past the moving wreckage and managed to stop a hundred yards further on. Stanton threw open his passenger door and stumbled into the road.

‘Fat lot we can do to help them,’ Brooks said grimly. He picked up the radio telephone to report in. Then he noticed that Stanton was being sick on the grass verge. At that moment the tractor’s petrol tank burst into flames.

PC Horace Brooks walked slowly back to the remains of the Zephyr. He had no real desire to examine the crumpled, broken bodies trapped inside the wreckage. One man was screaming hysterically, screaming that his legs were gone, screaming for quick death. The others seemed to be dead already.

Brooks spent several minutes hunting for the driver of the tractor, and eventually he found the man’s body in the field beyond the ditch. He was still alive, miraculously. To judge from the blood he had crawled about two yards and then lost consciousness.

‘You’ll never believe it,’ Horace Brooks said to a sickly looking PC Stanton, ‘but this is why I hate driving too fast. There are too many people about who should never be allowed behind a wheel.’

Stanton was making soothing noises to the man who had lost his legs, trying to calm him until the ambulance arrived. Horace Brooks shrugged gloomily, lit a cigarette, and sat on the grass to wait.

Half an hour later the scene was crowded. Two ambulances, a breakdown lorry and another police car had arrived to clear the debris. A police photographer and a young reporter from the local press had asked questions of everybody in sight, and a dozen people had materialised on the deserted road to provide an audience. PC Brooks was reporting to his inspector.

‘The tall man’s name is Thorne,’ he explained, ‘Oscar Thorne. They call him Skibby for some reason.’ He led the thick set, morose inspector from the ambulance back to the wrecked car. A man was using an oxyacetylene cutter to free one of the corpses. ‘But all these men are just thugs,’ he said, ‘they’re hoodlums. They wouldn’t know how to plan a bank raid.’

Detective Inspector Manley nodded. He was too busy trying to light his pipe to answer the constable. At last he waved away a cloud of smoke and coughed. ‘They may not have planned it, but they’re ruthlessly efficient. This is the third bank robbery in this part of the county in two weeks.’

‘Well, they didn’t get away with the money this time.’

PC Stanton had retrieved the large black leather bag from the Zephyr. ‘Do you want to take charge of this, sir?’ he asked the inspector.

‘Yes, I’ll take it back to the station.’ Inspector Manley took the bag and returned to his own car. He put the bag on the passenger seat and climbed in behind the wheel. ‘Report back to me as soon as this mess has been cleared up,’ he called to PC Brooks.

‘Aye aye, sir.’

Inspector Manley switched on the ignition and put the car into gear. Then he changed his mind and switched off. Curiosity had got the better of him. He took the black leather bag and applied a small penknife to the lock. It sprang open.

Manley stared in bewilderment at a copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. That was all the bag contained. The money was gone.

‘Another of the men whom the police wished to question in relation to the bank robbery yesterday afternoon at Harkdale has died, it was reported early this morning. The man was forty-three-year-old Oscar Thorne, described as a garage proprietor from south London. This brings the total number of deaths arising out of the robbery to four, and police sources say that the fifty thousand pound haul has still not been recovered –’

Desmond Blane switched off the radio as he climbed down the steps of the caravan into the field. He could still hear the newsreader’s voice droning in the next caravan. ‘The young widow of PC Harry Felton said last night –’ The heart strings in twenty-four caravans all the way to the edge of the ‘farm’ were probably being pulled by the young girl’s tragic bereavement. Desmond Blane sat on the bottom step and stared aggressively at the frost coloured grass.

Bloody farm indeed, he thought, it’s just a stretch of marsh land where nothing would grow and cows would sink into the ground if they stayed still. The Red Trees Caravan Site! He wondered whether to get dressed. It was cold to be hanging around in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown, and the matching silk scarf wasn’t keeping death from laryngitis at bay.

He looked up as he heard somebody whistling. It was Arnold Cookson, threading his way cheerfully through the neighbouring caravans with two pints of milk in his hands.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Desmond Blane asked roughly.

‘Up to the farmhouse.’

‘I’ve just heard the radio. Skibby’s dead.’

‘Oh.’ Arnold Cookson pursed his lips in a silent whistle. He was a much older man, in his early sixties perhaps, and he seemed upset by the news. ‘What about Larry and Ray?’ he asked.

‘They weren’t mentioned.’

Arnold Cookson pushed past him into the caravan. He poured some milk into a saucepan and lit the Calor gas ring. He was preparing breakfast.

‘Why does a farm sell milk in milk bottles?’

‘I don’t know.’ Arnold examined the milk bottle. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Skibby would have talked.’

‘So what makes you think Ray will keep his big mouth shut?’ Blane spoke loudly, blustering with nerves. ‘Once they start asking him awkward questions –’ His voice faded into silence. ‘Who’s this?’

There was a lorry bumping its way noisily down the lane to the caravan site. ‘Joseph Carter & Co.’ it proclaimed on the side. Blane walked suspiciously across to the gate.

‘We weren’t expecting you until this afternoon,’ he called.

Gavin Renson jumped cheerfully from the driving cabin. ‘I know, but we thought we’d come for breakfast.’ He took a large black leather bag from the tool compartment under his seat and strolled past Blane towards the caravan.

‘Come on, Jackson,’ he called to the dog. ‘Come and have your porridge.’