Maurice Procter - Murder Somewhere in This City

“They’d have you before you’d gone a mile, or else you’d lose your way,” said Starling, with just the right touch of derision.

“They wouldn’t,” snapped the mail thief. “An’ ’ow could I get lost, follerin’ t’line? I could walk ’ome in a fog.”

Starling carefully concealed his interest, but he was ready to listen whenever the man wanted to talk about his home and his wife. By adroit, seemingly uninterested questions he learned how he could literally find the little house in a fog. The first house in the first estate of council houses on the left of the line! Only five miles! A friend’s house, with a young woman living alone! The thought of it was an intoxicant. He was almost smothered by the pleasure of it.

“An’ I can get in wi’out wakin’ t’ neighbor’ood,” the mail thief boasted one day. “I’ve got a key ’id. I allus keep one ’id, just in case.”

“You’ll get your house broke into,” said Starling. “Sneak-inmen know just where to look for keys. On a string inside the letter box, under a stone near the door, on a ledge above the door, hanging on a nail somewhere inside the shed…”

He stopped, smiling inwardly. The sudden look of guarded anxiety on the mail thief’s face told him that one of his guesses had not been far from the truth. The key would not be hard to find.

The year wore on, the office building approached completion. In August some men from Outside began to put on the roofing slates. Toward the end of the month the mail thief complained that his wife had gone to Blackpool for a fortnight’s holiday. He was afraid of whom she would meet at Blackpool. “She’ll be danglin’ it off th’ end o’ t’ pier, tryin’ to catch a feller,” he predicted gloomily.

The news made Starling impatient. Now there was an empty house to walk into, and a man’s suit in the wardrobe. The mail thief was about the same size as himself, being flabby where he was muscular.

When his chance came, it was one of the simplest escapes that had ever been made from Pontfield. He had his eye on a ladder. At the end of every working day the ladders were taken away and carefully locked up, and brought out again in the morning. He had made himself useful in helping to put them up. It had become one of his jobs. He always put a long one around the corner of the building at the side nearest the perimeter wall, whether it was needed there or not. The men working on the building became used to that ladder in that position, and they seldom moved it. Often it stood there all day, unused and unnoticed.

With the ladder in mind Starling longed for a day of thick fog. Fog in August? What a hope!

The weather favored him. There was no fog, but a morning of dull heat after a wet night. Distant thunder rolled, coming nearer and nearer like the growl of a moving battle. The earth steamed, making a faint mist. After the midday break, the storm reached Pontfield. Black laden clouds brought twilight in early afternoon, and torrential rain began to fall with a swishing roar.

The Outside men came down from the roof and gathered with the prison working party on the upper floor of a roofed section of the building. There was some camaraderie, and giving of cigarettes in the gloom. The two prison officers in charge pretended not to see the illegal gifts of “snout.” The untimely darkness made them uneasy, and they did not want any sort of trouble.

Starling did not join in the talk and the cadging of cigarettes. He remained still and quiet, leaning against the door frame of a toilet cubicle as if he were tired. He watched the prison officers. They kept looking through a window opening toward the C.P.O.’s office, as if they were expecting an order to take their prisoners to a safer place.

When both the officers’ backs were turned for a moment, Starling slipped through the doorway into the toilet cubicle. There was no plumbing in the cubicle yet, nor any glass in the window. He climbed through the window frame, hung by his hands for a moment, and took the long drop to the ground. Nobody saw him go.

He ran round the building and got his ladder. Trailing the ladder, he hurried to the perimeter wall. He was concerned simply with the speed of his departure, and not with silence or concealment. The storm was noisy, and he did not expect to be seen in semidarkness through steamed-up windows and pouring rain.

He reared the ladder against the wall, and climbed it. When he was straddling the top of the wall he pulled up the heavy ladder. It was so wet that it tended to slip in his wet hands. But he got it up and over, and reared against the outer side. He climbed down, and so great was his haste that he slid the last few feet to the ground.

“Good-by,” he said to the prison wall. “You can try and catch me now.”

He took the ladder with him, and dropped it in long grass near the railway embankment, hoping that the absence of a visible means of escape would add a few minutes to the start he had gained. He climbed the embankment and, head down in the pouring rain, he began to run northward along the line.

He settled down to a steady jogtrot. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” he exulted to the beat of his own footsteps. His brown eyes peered watchfully from beneath heavy wet brows. His clothes were soaked, but he did not mind. He had a place to go: an unoccupied house with a key hidden somewhere around. There would be a clean, dry shirt and a decent civvy suit, and a raincoat maybe.

“There won’t be any money, but there’ll be something I can flog for bus fares,” he reflected. “A nice portable radio, happen.”

In spite of the decent civvy suit and the raincoat, it was a perilous homeward journey for Don Starling. He was a man who never underrated himself, and he was fully aware of his own importance as an escaped fourteen-year prisoner whose main crime had been the shooting of a police officer. He knew that every policeman within a hundred miles would be given his description and later his photograph.

In the mail thief’s house he found twenty-two shillings-rent money, probably-in a small toby jug, and for “flogging” purposes he selected an excellent little hand sewing machine. After an anxious five-mile bus journey into Leeds (he alighted before the bus reached the terminus) he was able to pawn the sewing machine for five pounds. It amused him to give the mail thief’s name and address to the pawnbroker.

With six pounds in his pocket, he decided how he would travel. Cross-country buses were too dangerous, he thought. He would go by train.

He studied a railway map which was pasted on a board outside one of the big stations. On the same long board there were half-a-dozen sheet timetables. He knew that this city of Leeds, so near to Pontfield, would soon be too hot for him, and he had to find an early train. He saw that there was one due to leave for Carlisle in fifteen minutes. He glanced at the map again, then walked boldly into the station.

In the station entrance he paused to buy an evening paper. He carried it folded. Near the ticket windows he saw a railway policeman and an obvious plainclothesman. Slapping the paper against his leg he walked briskly to the nearest window. He asked for a third-class return ticket to Hellifield, counted his change, and walked on into the station. By a great effort of will he did not so much as turn his head to see if the policemen were watching him.

The train was waiting. There were not many people on it. He chose an empty compartment and sat with his back to the engine, so that he could look toward the platform barrier. It was as well for him that he did so, because just before the train started two more plainclothesmen walked along the platform looking into every compartment. Starling did not hesitate. He dropped to the floor and squeezed under the seat.