“Did you find the body, Mr. Rollison?”
“Is this something new, or a development in a case you’re already working on, Toff?”
“Do the police know who it was?”
“How was he killed?”
They flung question after question at him, and he answered most and parried some, unaffected by insistence. The sum total of what he told them was the sum total of what he had told Chief Inspector Lumley, and the police statement would certainly coincide. After five minutes and a breathless : “Shan’t keep you two minutes Mr. Rollison!” from a man who had just arrived with a television camera, Rollison pushed his way through the crowd, his expression unsmiling, though amiable enough.
He took his car out of its parking place, and switched on the lights, then turned into St. John’s Wood Road, then into Finchley Road. A few people passed, walking. Two buses lumbered by, while private cars sped back and forth, their shiny roofs reflecting the light from the tall street lamps. He turned left, towards Swiss Cottage, and away from central London, and saw a motor-cyclist behind him, one who had been waiting near the block of flats. Thinking nothing of it, at first, he continued up the hill, towards the Pond.
The motor-cyclist still followed him.
He made a complete circuit of the block, and then headed back towards central London. In ten or at most twenty minutes he could be at Smith Hall. He drove slowly, and once past the brooding walls of Lord’s cricket ground turned into a side street.
Rollison pulled into the side of the road, hesitated at the wheel, then put on the offside parking light, and got out. He was opposite a block of flats, and walked straight in. There was a hall, a staircase in the middle, a door marked EXIT on the right. He slipped behind this door but kept it ajar; and waited.
He heard footsteps, very light, almost stealthy.
A small figure appeared, topped by a white crash helmet, face half obliterated by goggles. Walking softly, this person crept to the stairs, looking to right and left. Rollison went out by the side door and strode quickly round to the front, re-entering the hall. The motorcyclist was standing near the stairs, obviously at a loss. Rollison went straight up to him, shot out his hands and gripped him by the collar.
“Looking for me?” he demanded.
He was prepared for a kick, prepared for a twist or a wriggle, but not prepared for the startled gasp and the sudden, terrified stillness, And when he pulled the crash helmet off he was not prepared for the lovely cascade of fair and rippling hair.
“What—what are you doing?” the motor-cyclist gasped. “Le—let me go!”
“Soon,” said Rollison. “When you’ve taken off those goggles and let me have a good look at you.”
The girl put her hands up to her head and eased the goggles off slowly. The light was too dim for him to see the colour of her eyes but he could see she was young, perhaps no older than Angela. She was trembling a little but she did not try to dodge or run away, only stared at him in defiance.
“Why did you follow me?” he demanded.
“I—I didn’t know you’d spotted me.”
“A blind man would have spotted you. Who are you?”
“I’m—I’m Gwendoline Fell,” she stated.
The name was vaguely familiar but did not immediately ring a bell. He let her go.
“You’re lucky I didn’t break your neck, Gwendoline Fell.”
As he repeated the name, he realised why it was familiar. She had a column in the Daily Globe, one of the most popular of the dailies, and also had a reputation for scathing comment and vitriolic personal attacks.
The realisation of her identity made him laugh.
“So you’ve realised who I am,” she said in a tart voice.
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t wait to read your column tomorrow. Is the Globe short of crime reporters, or did you just happen along?”
“I never ‘happen along’,” stated Gwendoline Fell, dryly.
“So you went with malice aforethought.”
“Will you tell me why?” asked Rollison.
At the back of his mind there was the thought that she might have been puzzled by Webberson’s disappearance, even that she might have some knowledge of the trouble at Smith Hall. She was just the columnist to sniff out any kind of scandal, and if there was one at Smith Hall she would make a righteous best of it, for she was a great champion of the young and the poor and the defenceless. “Yes, I’ll tell you why,” she said. “I think you’re a parasite.”
“You think I’m a what?” asked Rollison, and stared open-mouthed.
“You see, you can hardly believe your ears,” she said sardonically. “You’re so accustomed to your special kind of inherited divine right that when anyone tells you the truth about yourself, you don’t even recognise it. You are a parasite, Mr. Rollison. You feed off the lives of others. You put on a cloak of altruism but in fact you’re a—”
“Parasite,” interjected Rollison, recovering.
“That time I was going to say, an anachronism.”
“Oh. Out of date, you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean. And when I heard you were at Packham House I couldn’t get there soon enough. I’ve been waiting for a chance to put you under the searchlights. You have no right to usurp the duties of the police, for your own self-aggrandisement. Tell me—have you ever done a full day’s work in your life?”
“Er—” began Rollison.
“Have you?”
“Er—”
“You know perfectly well that you haven’t. You live off inherited money, you dabble in a few good deeds and make a few donations to good causes, you employ a fully able-bodied man who has pampered you all your life. You are a—”
“I cooked my own supper tonight,” stated Rollison, defensively.
“As I was about to say, you are an anachronism and a parasite in today’s world.”
“Until you told me, I didn’t realise it,” Rollison assured her. “Tell me, do you always interview your victims this way? And do you always gather your evidence from hearsay and unreliable sources and then add a few fancy touches and consider the subject damned?”
“In the two years since I left university,” said Gwendoline Fell, with great deliberatio, “I have done more work and helped society—people, human beings—more than you have done in your whole life. And you must be in the middle forties.”
“Do you know,” said Rollison. “You’ve actually got one thing right. Don’t forget to include that in your column, will you?”
“You no doubt think that’s funny,” said Gwendoline, in an acid voice. “I don’t. Any man who seizes upon the murder of a friend to help him win more cheap popularity with people whom he has fooled for years is incapable of amusing me. I—what are you doing?”
“Proving how funny I can be,” said Rollison, con-trolling his sudden anger. He slid one arm at the back of Gwendoline’s waist, and bent her double over his knee: and then six times in slow, deliberate succession, he spanked her with the flat of his hand—hard enough, he knew, to sting but not hard enough to hurt. She was taken so much by surprise that not until the fifth spank did she begin to wriggle, and at the sixth he picked her up and placed her on her feet again.
“But that in your column, Gwendoline,” he said. “And if you ever sneak up on me again, I’ll repeat the dose!
“My God!” she breathed in a voice choked with rage, “I’ll make you pay for this. I’ll make you pay!”
She spun round and almost ran out of the foyer, and he stood staring after her, smiling, half-glad that he had acted so; but already half-sorry.
Then it came to his mind that for ten minutes or more she had made him forget all about Angela.
At least she hadn’t been able to follow him to Smith Hall.
CHAPTER 7
Smith Hall
ROLLISON drove more slowly than usual back to town, keeping a very sharp lookout, giving every car which appeared to stay behind him every chance to overtake. Satisfied that he had not been followed again he drove along Bloomdale Street, one of the few in the district where large single houses were still safe from the clan-gour of the demolition machines. Most of them were now used for business, university or hostel purposes; Rollison believed only one was still used as a private residence. There was some echo in his mind of a story about the owner, Sir Douglas Slaker—no, Slesser—no, but something like it. One of the old school, he had re-fused to sell any of the considerable properties he had in central London—oh, that was it! Sir Douglas Slatter, twice compelled by the law to give way to town planning schemes, more often successful in holding up what some called progress and he called vandalism.
Rollison had more than a sneaking admiration for him.
But he, Slatter, was an anachronism, too!
For the first time, he laughed at his treatment of Gwendoline Fell. Then he recalled that he had not remembered who she was, at first; his memory was failing.
“Don’t be a damned fool,” he said sotto voce.
The big corner house, Number 31, was Smith Hall, the name and the number written on the fanlight over the front door, very clearly. There was no board in the grounds, nothing he could see to announce the fact that it was a hostel.
The house next door to it was Slatter’s. He drove past, parking fifty or sixty yards away, then walked back to the hostel, glancing behind him all the time, still on edge because of Gwendoline. He had to step into the roadway at a spot cordoned off by flickering lamps outside a plot of land where builders were working but he hardly noticed it. He was about to turn into the gateway when he saw a shadow, thrown from a front room window light, on the ground. It looked like a man’s head and shoulders. He walked on, without slackening his pace even for a moment. But he did not go far, just turned round and walked back towards Smith Hall very softly.
He could still see the shadow.
There was a low brick wall between the two gardens, and between the wall and each house perhaps ten feet. He turned softly into the garden of Number 29, thankful for the grass underfoot, which deadened the sound of his approach. He went along by the wall, and slowly the figure of a man materialised, waiting in the shadows and watching Smith Hall.
The nearer Rollison drew, the bigger and more powerful the man seemed to be.
Rollison, making no sound at all on the grass, drew level; only about four feet and the stone wall—no more than four feet high—were between him and the lurking man. Rollison watched and waited, just as the other was doing.
The man was obviously watching the front door of Smith Hall.
Anyone who came out of the Hall would not see him, and he would need to take only two or three quick steps forward to reach the flagged path. He was so still that if it were not for his breathing he might have been mistaken for a statue.
Had he a weapon in his right hand?
Rollison could not be sure, for the whole of the man’s right side was in darkness, no light reached it at all. The left arm only could be seen, half-raised, the hand resting against the dark overcoat. And he was gloved.
His shoulders were enormous.
People passed, footsteps sharp on the pavement. Cars passed, mostly with only parking lights on, some with headlights dimmed, but bushes in the grounds of the Hall were so placed that the man was almost completely hidden; only the Toff, whose power of observation amounted to a sixth sense, would have noticed him.
There was a sudden click from the porch, as of a door being opened. The man seemed to square his shoulders, and to raise his right arm. Now at last Rollison could see that he carried something heavy, it looked like a bricklayer’s hammer with its massive steel head.
The door opened; brighter light shone but did not fall upon the waiting man. Rollison placed a hand on the wall, ready to vault over, quite sure that he could forestall any attack. He saw the shadow of a woman thrown by the light in the hall, then heard the door slam and the light was dim again.
Naomi Smith stepped from the porch on to the path. The waiting man raised the weapon in his hand, and leapt forward.
And as he leapt and as Naomi cried out in alarm, the Toff vaulted over the wall and called in a sharp voice of command:
“Keep still! Don’t move!”
On the instant the assailant spun away from Naomi and towards the Toff, who now saw that there was a stocking drawn over the big face, making it quite unrecognisable. He saw, too, the murderous hammer swinging, not towards Naomi Smith but towards his own bare head.
Rollison flung up a hand to fend off the blow and swung to one side. He caught the other’s forearm on his own, and it was like a steel bar. Off-balance, he tried to pivot, sensing that his assailant would rush at him, knowing that a man of such strength would be dangerous and could be deadly. He caught a glimpse of the stocking-covered face; it looked like the face of an idiot. Too near for a punch to be effective, Rollison gripped the other’s wrist, and twisted in an attempt to heave the man over his shoulder. He failed. He caught a doubled knee, intended for the groin, on the inner side of his thigh.
He heard shouting : a woman, then a man, then several men.
He gripped again but the masked assailant pulled himself free, then swung away and leapt the wall, dis- appearing from sight, as two men rushed down the path towards Naomi Smith, who was standing like a figure carved from stone.
Voices broke, incoherently.
“What was it?”
“Where is he?”
“Is anyone hurt?”
There were a dozen useless questions while Rollison moved towards the wall and began to search the ground. There was so little light here. A policeman turned into the gate. As Rollison bent down, a young man joined him.
“Looking for something?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got a torch.” There was a click, and a pale beam of light wavered over grass and the dark brick wall—and then shone on the heavy-looking head of a bricklayer’s hammer.
“What’s that?” the youth darted forward.
“Don’t touch it !” exclaimed Rollison, in time to make the other draw back.
Behind them, Naomi Smith was saying: “I’m all right, I am, really.” On Rollison’s right the policeman was bearing down and a number of other people had gathered in the gateway. Why did people have to stand and gape and watch when others suffered? What sadistic streak lay buried in man?
“Good evening,” said the policeman. He was slight but quite tall and had a faintly Scottish accent. “What’s happening here?”
“A man was waiting to attack whoever was coming out of the house, as far as I can tell,” answered Rollison. “I happened to spot him. He dropped this,” He pointed to the hammer, glad to notice that the policeman bending down, made no attempt to touch it. “The assailant got away.”
Was anyone hurt?” asked the constable, practically.
“I don’t think so,” said Rollison. “Unless he himself was. This is a hostel for young women, and—”
