Maurice Procter - Murder Somewhere in This City

The black police Jaguar surged powerfully up a steep and narrow moorland road, nosed carefully round a walled corner, and emerged on top of the world. Or so it seemed. The way ahead ran comparatively straight along the edge of a high moor, and on one side the ground sloped away, down, down, down to the lower lands.

Detective Inspector Martineau was sitting beside the driver of the car. “Where are we now?” he asked, in a tone which suggested that he would be surprised if the other man could tell him.

Detective Constable Devery was the driver. “I don’t know, sir,” he replied, with astonishment in his voice, as if it were indeed strange that Martineau of all people did not know exactly where he was.

Martineau gave the young man an amused sidelong glance, then he turned to look at the view. Though the day was dry and clear, there was not much to see: only rough fields stretching away downhill until they faded into the haze from several hundred square miles of smoking chimneys. Down there, ten miles away, was a city of a million people, but the city was the hub of a wheeling spread of suburbs, satellites and close neighbors which made it, in reality, one of the very big cities of the world.

“I don’t know about London,” he said. “They should have called Granchester the Big Smoke.”

“The Metropolis of the North,” said Devery. “What Granchester says today, London forgot yesterday.”

Martineau considered the gibe. Devery was a Liverpool man, and such remarks were to be expected from him. But they were not to go unanswered.

“I’d sooner be a church gargoyle in Granchester than the Lord Mayor of Liverpool,” he said.

“Every tomcat likes his own back alley,” Devery retorted, and then he was worried by a sudden fear that he had said too much.

But Martineau’s face wore the taut grin which was one of its characteristics. “You had to come there to make a living, anyway,” he said. “Life too hard in Liverpool, was it?” Without waiting for a reply, he reached forward and turned on the two-way radio. “Headquarters range is about ten miles, I believe,” he said. “We might be able to hear something up here.”

“I hope we hear that somebody has collared Starling.”

“Same here,” Martineau agreed. “It’s been three days now, and we haven’t had the faintest whiff of him. I don’t like it at all.”

It was business connected with Don Starling which had taken them into the hills. If Starling had been avoiding roads and keeping in the heather, the moorland village was a likely place for him to be seen. It was on a direct line of route between the prison which had failed to hold him and his home town of Granchester.

Because they knew Starling so well, Martineau and Devery had been sent from the city to help the County in the hunt. They had traveled eagerly to an out station, only to be disappointed. A stranger in a remote hamlet had been arrested, but he had not been Starling, only a vagrant with claustrophobia. There had been nothing for the City men to do but get back into their car and go home. On the return journey along secondary roads, Devery had lost his way.

When the radio had warmed up, Martineau turned it on to full power. Immediately he caught the last words of a message: “… dark saloon car of American type, rather old and shabby. There are several men in the car with the girl.”

“Something happening in town,” he said, leaving the set at “receive.”

“Hit and run, maybe,” Devery guessed. Then he stopped the car. They were at the top of a steep declivity, and the way ahead was revealed. The narrow road curved and twisted away downhill, but not in the direction they wanted to go. It headed back into hill country. It was joined by a stony, rain-gullied track which did indeed descend toward Granchester, but it was much too rough for the precious Jaguar.

“I think I know where we are,” said Martineau. “The good road takes us out of our way, but it brings us to the main Granchester-Halifax road.”

Devery set the car in motion and started the long descent, taking the numerous bends only as fast as perfect control would allow. Like most young men, he looked his best when he was absorbed in the efficient handling of a vehicle. He held his broad, big-boned frame erect, and his long, rather handsome face was set calmly and firmly.

The voice of Headquarters spoke again: “GCPR to all cars. Message two-sixteen. Further to robbery-violence and abduction in Higgitt’s Passage. American car believed to have gone eastward from scene of crime.”

Martineau looked at the empty winding lane, the deserted moorland, and the high gray clouds, but in his mind’s eye he saw Higgitt’s Passage in the throbbing heart of the city. A narrow thoroughfare among crowded streets, surrounded by buildings thronged with people. Robbery with violence at the busiest time of a fine Saturday morning. A sudden shout, a scream maybe, a rush of feet, a slamming of doors followed by the snarl and squeal of harshly used brakes and tires: momentary overtones in the city’s roar. A slick, quick crime, obviously. A city crime committed by city denizens. Denizens of the underworld. Rats. Like rats they crept out of their holes to attack and steal, and scurry away.

Out there in the wide spaces of untainted air the city’s fume-laden atmosphere, the city’s crime, and the city’s rats seemed to be distant in time and space. Something had happened in another world; another world ten miles away.

“So it’s a job,” said Martineau.

“And what a job. Kidnaping, no less. It’s a long time since we had anything of that sort.”

“So long I can’t remember. It must be the girl who’s been abducted. I wonder who she is.”

“And I’m wondering what time it happened. The car is heading in this direction… It might take the Halifax road…”

“Yes. Go a bit faster if you can.”

Devery began to show that with a Jaguar he could go quite a lot faster. Presently, a mile away, the main road came into view. It climbed straight up to the higher moors. There was traffic on the road: tiny crawling beetles on a gray ribbon.

Martineau kept his glance on the distant moving vehicles. Was there a prewar American car among them? A Chrysler or a Dodge or a Studebaker? Carrying some city rats away from their holes for a while? The man who had first used the term “underworld” in connection with criminals had known what he was talking about. Rat runs. Sewers. Well, there were cats to deal with the rats. Patient and painstaking cats. In that respect Martineau did not mind being referred to as a tomcat who liked his own back alley.

There were a few houses and a pub at the road junction. When they reached it Devery drew in at the near side, close to a low stone wall. Looking over the wall they could see traffic approaching at speed from the Granchester direction, taking a run at the long hill and rightly ignoring the junction with the minor road.

Martineau glanced at the pub with a certain longing. At times, in suitable company, he liked to drink in pubs. After an uninteresting drive and an anticlimax, this could have been one of those times. He thought of a cool bar and a pint of foaming ale. He began to whistle softly as he watched the road.

“If the job happened half an hour ago, the Yankee car could be away, past us,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll give it fifteen minutes.”

“We’re out of our jurisdiction here,” Devery reminded him.

The inspector nodded, and continued to watch the road. Devery considered him, wondering what action he would take under certain circumstances. He studied the blunt-featured, not unattractive face. The eyes were noticeably gray, and the blond hair was gray at the temples. An unobtrusive gray suit completed that color scheme, and the suit covered the body of a heavyweight athlete. Devery comfortably reflected that if there were any trouble with “several men” in an American car, the hardest hitter in the Granchester police would be on his side.