His subordinates eyed each other a trifle uncomfortably and waited for him to speak.
They watched him turn over one report after another, scanning them briefly and stopping twice to make a pencilled note on the pad at his elbow. Meanwhile, the cigarette he had been smoking slowly burnt on the ash-tray beside him.
A man in his late fifties, Sir Robert had attained his present position by a reputation for his capacity to digest facts rapidly and methodically and, having done so, to arrive at a rapid decision which usually proved to be the right one.
The smoke from the chief’s cigarette tickled Locksley’s nose and he felt a sudden craving to light one himself, but would not dare to do so without Sir Robert’s invitation. There was an air of discipline about this plainly furnished office which one did not associate with tea-drinking and cigarettes. When you went to see Sir Robert you gave him your information, received his instructions, and left to put them into operation.
However, the gelignite robberies were in a class of their own and on a scale that had not been encountered at the Yard for some years. A lorry load of gelignite which had been dispatched to the scene of some mining operations in Cornwall had never arrived at its destination, though the driver was discovered lying senseless at the side of the road in the early hours of the morning. All he remembered was climbing into his cab after calling at an all-night pull-up near Taunton, and receiving a blow on the head which resulted in slight concussion. He had not even caught a glimpse of his assailant.
A week later, the safe at a large super cinema at Norwich was blown open with gelignite, and the week’s takings, amounting to about one thousand five hundred pounds, were stolen. This was presumably in the nature of a try-out, for the gelignite gang almost immediately went after bigger game. They began with a jeweller’s safe in Birmingham, which yielded over five thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds, pearls and platinum settings. After Birmingham came Leicester, Sheffield, Oldham and Shrewsbury. The aggregate value of the stolen goods was now in the region of five figures.
The deputy commissioner looked up from the report of the raid on the Gloucester jewellers, which he had been scanning carefully.
‘What about this night watchman?’ he inquired.
‘I’m afraid he’s dead, sir,’ replied Locksley. ‘He was pretty heavily chloroformed and according to the doctor his heart was in a bad state to stand up to any sudden shock.’
Sir Robert frowned.
‘This is getting extremely serious,’ he murmured. ‘We shall have the papers playing it up worse than ever; then some damn fool will be asking a question in the House. Was this night watchman above board?’
Locksley shook his head.
‘I’m afraid not, sir. He’d only been with the firm about a month. He joined them under the name of Brookfield, but we soon found he had a long record as Wilfred Hiller, alias Burns. Everything from petty thefts to smash and grab.’
‘Humph! He might have been part of the set-up,’ grunted Sir Robert. ‘Pity they gave him an overdose …’
‘It was one way to make sure he didn’t talk—and to avoid paying him his cut,’ Kennard pointed out quietly.
Sir Robert nodded. ‘Who was in charge down there?’ he asked.
‘Inspector Dovey had already arrived when we got there—you remember we recalled him from the Special Branch to work on the gelignite jobs,’ replied Locksley. ‘He was questioning the constable who had discovered the robbery, a young man named Roscoe. Roscoe’s only been in the force two years, but he’s quite a good record. He was apparently passing the jewellers on his beat and noticed that the side door was open a couple of inches, so he went in to investigate.’
‘What about fingerprints?’
‘Nothing we can trace, except Hiller, the night watchman’s, and they were nowhere near the safe,’ replied Locksley. ‘It was the same on all the other jobs. There’s somebody running the outfit who knows his way around.’
Sir Robert shrugged and went on reading the report, a tiny furrow deepening between his eyebrows, and his lips tightening into a thin line.
‘What did Dovey have to say?’ he inquired at length.
Kennard smiled. ‘He didn’t seem to know whether he was coming or going. Talked about a large criminal organization—I think he’s been meeting too many international spies.’ A note of contempt in his voice prompted Hargreaves to ask:
‘Then you don’t think it is a criminal organization?’
Kennard shook his head most decisively, a flicker of a grin around his thin mouth.
‘We’re always reading about these big criminal set-ups,’ he said sarcastically, ‘but I’ve been with the police here and abroad for over fifteen years without coming across a sign of any really elaborate organization. Crooks don’t work that way; it’s every man for himself and to hell with the one who’s caught. Of course, we had the racecourse gangs a few years back, but that was different—not what you’d call scientifically planned crime. If you ask me, these jobs have been pulled by a little bunch of old lags.’
Sir Robert swung round in his chair and stubbed out his cigarette.
‘What do you think, Locksley?’ he demanded. The superintendent glanced across at his colleague and shifted somewhat uncomfortably in his chair.
‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with Kennard, Sir Robert,’ he admitted at last. The inspector looked startled for a moment and appeared to be about to make some comment, but he changed his mind, and Locksley went on: ‘I thought the same as Kennard for some time, but I’ve come to the conclusion this last week or so that these jobs are being planned to the last detail by some mentality far and away above that of the average crook.’
Hargreaves gave no sign as to whether he was impressed by this argument, other than by making a brief note on his pad.
‘Did you see the night watchman before he died?’ he asked. Locksley nodded.
‘Yes, sir. He was in pretty bad shape, of course, and I thought he wouldn’t be able to say anything. But the doctor gave him an injection, and he seemed to recover consciousness.’
‘Well, what did he say?’ urged Hargreaves with a note of impatience in his tone.
The superintendent rubbed his hands rather nervously.
‘I couldn’t be quite sure, sir,’ he replied dubiously, ‘but it sounded to me rather like “Grey Moose”.’
There was a sound of suppressed chuckle from Kennard, but the deputy commissioner was quickly turning through his file.
‘Here we are,’ he said suddenly. ‘A report on the Oldham case—you remember Smokey Pearce died rather mysteriously soon after. He was run over by a lorry—found by a constable on the Preston road—there was an empty jewel case on him from the Oldham shop.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said Kennard. ‘But we couldn’t get him to talk …’
‘Wait,’ said Hargreaves. ‘He did manage to get out a couple of words before he passed out … “Grey Moose”.’
‘The same words exactly,’ said Locksley, his eyes lighting up. ‘But what the devil do they mean? It might be a brand of pressed beef—’
‘Or one of these American cigarettes,’ put in Kennard.
Hargreaves waved aside these interruptions.
‘It must mean something,’ he insisted. ‘Two dying men don’t speak the same words exactly just by coincidence.’
Locksley nodded slowly.
‘I see what you’re driving at, sir,’ he said. ‘You think these two were in on those jobs, and the gang wiped ’em out so as to take no chances of their giving the game away. They sound a pretty callous lot of devils.’