Maurice Procter - Two men in twenty

Martineau strode to the cabinet. It had one tall door and one lock. Though he had ceased to hope to find useful fingerprints after these robberies, he pulled at the door with the nail of one finger in the keyhole. The door swung open. The interior of the cabinet was bare. Obviously the drawers had been removed to make room for an oxygen cylinder.

'This could have been a daylight job,' he said. 'It was early closing for you yesterday?'

'Yes. Twelve-thirty.'

'Did you go to the bank in the morning?'

'No. I don't go on early closing day.'

*How much did they get?'

'Eight hundred and thirty-three pounds in notes. As you can see, they left the silver behind.'

'They haven't touched the silver?'

'No, it's all there. I counted the bags without touching them.'

Martineau nodded. 'They got this cylinder in by pretending to deliver the filing cabinet,' he said. He did not ask himself how the thieves could have carried in the heavier acetylene cylinder. He had been learning a little about oxygen cutting. He made a guess that the XXC mob had used propane instead of acetylene on this daylight robbery. A steel 'bottle' of propane could be carried inside a carton of moderate size.

'Any idea how they got in?'

'No, not really. The shop door has two locks, a latch and a mortise. When I came to open it this morning it was on the latch only. The mortise wasn't locked. I assumed I'd forgotten to lock it when I left yesterday. That is, until I came in here.'

Devery returned. He said: 'There's a tiny window at the back. All the putty is on the ground. The glass is simply held in place by four carpet tacks.'

'So now we've got the picture. It corresponds with others we've got. Their door-and-window man nearly always goes in ahead of the others. He's their pathfinder, and he's a good one. This time he took out that back window and climbed through, and one of his mates put the glass back and pushed the tacks in to hold it. He came through the shop and worked on the mortise lock from the inside. When he'd turned it, he gave the griff, and the others drove up as large as life with the filing cabinet and one or two cartons holding their stuff. When they'd done the job they left by the front door, and left it latched. The man on the beat would find the door secure. If he was doing his job he went round the back, but unless he was brighter than most, he wouldn't notice the putty on the ground. The window would look all right to him.'

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'That business of lifting the window clean out is typical,' he said. 'It's been done before by the same man. It's an M.O. that should lead us to somebody. If he has any form at all, some copper somewhere should know him.'

* * * * *

Later the same morning Martineau sat in conference with Clay, and for once it was Clay who did most of the listening.

'I'm doing all I can,' the chief inspector said. 'Somebody might have noticed a car or a van outside the Co-op. Somebody might have actually seen the men. We're doing all the lodging houses, or as many as we can find. We're pushing the oxygen job. We've got the noses smelling around every likely looking stranger they see. All the routine is well covered.'

'And that's all?'

'No. I've asked Scotland Yard for a full copy of the file on every job they've done, and every inquiry made about them. As I see it, there are at least two tip-top men in that mob. One is the fellow who's master-minding it, the other is their door-and-window man. It's my opinion that those two are out-and-out professionals. There can't be more than two dozen men of their quality in the entire country. It's almost certain that they've got some form, but if they haven't, somebody will know them. Especially that door-opener. I think I can get on to him by studying the M.O. of every job that's been done. I think it could lead me to the head man, too. When I've listed the characteristics of every job I'm going to start going back through the Gazette and Police Reports, looking for 'em. If I can't put my finger on one or both of 'em, at least I'll get 'em on a short list.'

'That could help, but paper work isn't your line. Put some men on it.'

'I'm going to do this job myself, then I'll be satisfied. But I'm also going to put two men on it, in the hope they'll find something I've missed.'

'And when you've got your short list?'

'I'll put twenty faces and descriptions on a sheet, and have it plastered up in every police station for twenty miles around. Every C.I.D. office, every parade room, and every canteen and mess room, so that the men can stare at those faces while they're eating their dinners.'

'Right,' Clay nodded his approval. 'We'll go further than that. If I can get the Chief to allow the expense, we'll make a little booklet with twenty pages, and every one of our own men will carry the book in his pocket at all times. This XXC mob aren't invisible men. We ought to spot one of 'em sooner or later.'

'Also, I took two of our youngest C.I.D. men, Birkett and Rhodes, out of D Div. They've got new jobs for themselves, at North Western Oxygen, with your permission. Birkett will be a checker and Rhodes will be a driver. Nobody but the personnel manager and the Cylinder Investigation Officer will know they're policemen.'

Again Clay nodded. 'Permission granted. Perhaps we should have done that a long time ago.'

'Perhaps we should, but this shower hadn't descended on us then.'

'That is so. Anything else?'

'They seem to have a weakness for Co-operative stores. We could have special patrols on all the Co-ops, and we could have the bigger ones, the main branches, watched all the time when they're closed.'

'We can do that if we borrow some men from Uniform and put them into civvies. I'll see to it.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'That's all we can do at the moment, then?'

'Unless Sergeant Bird and his crew turn something up.'

'You think there's some chance of that?'

'No, sir,' Martineau said. 'Not with this mob.'

A bred-in-the-bone Londoner like her husband, Dorrie Cain did not readily take to life in Granchester. Neither did she like living in the house in Grange Gardens. But she had to admit that the house was comfortable enough, and that there might be worse cities.

It soon became apparent to both husband and wife what Mr. Haw the lawyer had meant when he said that the district had 'gone down'. Their neighbours on both sides of the street were Jamaicans, Pakistanis, and Poles, a Pole being, in Granchester, any East European. These hard-working immigrants struggling to make a living in a strange country, holding lowly positions, lived perforce twenty or thirty in a seven-roomed house and did not bother to paint their doors and window frames. They would, later. This was made evident by the Poles, who had been there for a longer time than the others. They had house-buying associations of their own, and they were beginning to take pride in their property. Already the Jamaicans were getting the same idea, and no doubt the Pakistanis would follow suit.

Cain was delighted with these people. They did not intrude. They had enough to do minding their own affairs without bothering about their neighbours. Being strangers themselves, they were not particularly interested in other strangers. And they were better behaved than the inhabitants of his own Caledonian Road. They were no trouble to the police.

There was one smudge on this peaceful picture. Nightly uproars, fortunately at the other end of Grange Gardens, informed him that there was a troublesome element. He learned eventually that this was a clan of Irish gypsies, about forty of them, who were living in a dilapidated mansion. On arrival in England these people had ceased to be nomads. They had found a place to settle, and in spite of efforts to move them they meant to stay. The Welfare State was the Canaan they had been seeking for generations. Bless you, man, it was ideal for a person who did not want turkey for dinner every day. National Assistance, Unemployment pay, a nice weekly allowance for every child but the first, and a free doctor to bandage your head when somebody cracked it. All this, and no need for a man to put his hand to a shovel. And if a policeman lost his temper and broke you a few teeth, bedad the magistrates would punish him for it. And now it was legal to brew your own beer. O happy land. Let us sing a song of Erin, an isle we shall never see again.