Hammond Innes: The Trojan Horse

By five o’clock I was no longer waiting impatiently for him to come. I knew he would not come and I was wondering what I was to do. The most obvious course was to get in touch with the police. But I remembered his words about not finding it a case for the police at first. And there was that letter. The man had seemed so certain that he was going to die. I owed it to him to go round to his digs and make a few inquiries. Nevertheless, it was a police affair. I ought at least to get Crisham to come along with me. I rose from my chair by the fire and crossed to the phone. I hesitated on the point of lifting the receiver. That stuff about the face from the barbican and the clue being the cones of runnel. I could hear Crisham’s soft sardonic chuckle. He was a hard-headed man, who believed in facts — and nothing else. He’d come, of course, but he’d say at once that the man was mad, and his only interest would be to trace Schmidt’s whereabouts.

I went over to the door instead and got my hat and coat. My mind made up now, I hurried out of my chambers and up Middle Temple Lane and hailed a taxi in Fleet Street. We ran through a darkened Strand and by way of St Martin’s Lane to Cambridge Circus. I was deposited outside a derelict-looking house practically opposite the stage door of the London Casino. It had once been a shop, but the windows were boarded up and the place had a shut look. I paid off my taxi and then flashed my torch on to the door. The figures 209 showed black against the cracked green paint, and below was a little sign which said ‘Isaac Leinster, Bespoke Tailor’. I found an electric bell, that had lost its covering, and rang. No sound came from the other side of the door. I waited, and then rang again. No one answered. I knocked on the door. Then I stepped back and looked up. The aged brick face of the house towered above me, blank and sheer.

I played my torch over the door again, looking for another bell to ring, and I saw that it was not quite shut. I pressed against it, and it opened. I went in and found myself in a bare passage, with two dustbins in it, leading to uncarpeted stairs. I hesitated. I was not over keen on walking into a house on Greek Street that I did not know. But in the end I climbed the stairs and on the first floor I found a door with ‘Isaac Leinster’ on it, and there was a line of light showing beneath.

I knocked and heard feet shuffling across bare floorboards. The door swung open and a small man with thick lips and a bald head stared at me out of little beady eyes. ‘Vat is it you vant?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said, ‘but I’m looking for a friend of mine who lives here.’

‘Vat is ’is nime?’

I hesitated. What was his name? He surely wouldn’t have given it as Severin? Then in a flash I remembered what he had told me about his parentage. ‘Mr Frank Smith,’ I said and I began to describe him.

The other held up his hand. ‘I know. But Mr Smith is not ’ere now. ’E ’as ’ad an accident and is in ’ospital.’

‘Which hospital?’ I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘’Ow do I know?’ he complained. ‘A gent goms ’ere on Thursday, says ’e ees from the ’ospital and can ’e ’ave Mr Smeeth’s clothes. Vat do you vant?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I left some rather important scientific papers with him. He promised to let me have them back by last Friday and I’ve got to give a talk on them tomorrow evening.’

He looked me up and down, and then said, ‘Veil, you’d best go up and look for them. Another three days and you’d ’ave been too late. ’Is rent is due on Thursday and I’ll ’ave to clear all ’is junk out You’ll find the door open. It’s right at the top.’ And with that he closed the door.

I went on up the stairs and eventually came to the top landing from which a wooden staircase, obviously put in at a later date, rose sharply to a green-painted door. I climbed this and knocked at the door. There was no answer, so I pulled the string of the latch and went into what was apparently a penthouse. I switched on the light. It was a largish room, the ceiling sloped to a skylight, which was boarded up because of the black-out. It had probably been built as a studio, for there were glimmerings of the artistic in its construction that were noticeably absent from the rest of the house.

The furniture appeared to be the sweepings of the second-hand market. There was a double bed in the corner under the window, all brass and cast iron, two old kitchen chairs, an uncomfortable-looking Victorian armchair, complete with a very dirty antimacassar, a dresser of plain wood and a little mahogany table that had been good, but was now split right down the centre. In the far corner was a sink, half-filled with dirty dishes. The place was indescribably filthy and very untidy. There were crumbs all over the floor where vermin had got at a loaf, which lay crumbling on the table.

I looked round in some bewilderment. ‘Go round to my lodgings and take the face from the barbican,’ Schmidt had said. A barbican was the outer defences of a castle. How could there be a barbican in this hovel? There weren’t any pictures and there was nothing that looked remotely like a barbican. I couldn’t even see a face anywhere. A sense of frustration seized me. I had been so busy recently that I had not bothered to think out the significance of Schmidt’s words. Or were they just the ravings of an unbalanced brain?

I went over to the dresser and pulled out one of the drawers. There were clothes in it and some handkerchiefs that were clean and had the ironing creases in them, though they were jumbled up with the rest. I tried the next drawer, and here again clean clothes had been jumbled up in an untidy heap. The man from the hospital must have been in a hurry in his search for the right clothes. But why should he have been in such a hurry?

I turned and looked at the room again. It was untidy, but the untidiness was methodical. The bedclothes were all bunched up and loose where the mattress had been flung back, the tattered linoleum was bent up all round the walls and the books in the little bookcase by the fireplace were not all the right way up. The room was not untidy because it had been lived in. It was untidy because someone had searched it thoroughly.

A little pile of books on the floor caught my eye because on the back of them I noticed a woman’s face and it had suddenly given me an idea. I went forward and picked it up. It was an Ethel M. Dell. I knelt down and went slowly through the bookcase. On the second shelf, in a batch of five that had been put back upside down, I found what I was looking for. It was a recently purchased thriller and on the jacket was a man’s face framed in a barbican. It was called The Face from the Barbican and was by Mitchel Cleaver. I stood up and flicked through the pages. But there was no letter there, nothing written. I felt disappointed. Then I began to consider what Schmidt had meant by the cones of runnel. I thought it possible that it might be the title of another book.

As I bent down to run through the bottom shelf, I heard the sound of a door closing and was immediately conscious of the house that lurked in the dark below me. I stood up and went to the door. All was silent as the grave. Then suddenly a stair creaked, and then another. I heard the creak of the banisters and, in the silence, I could hear a man’s deep breathing on the staircase below me. I thought of the man who had searched the room before me. Had he been looking for what I had found?

I switched off the light and waited. There was no place to hide. I could hear the man’s breathing quite plainly now as he climbed to the landing immediately below me. Had they been watching the house or was it one of the people who lived there? Why had Schmidt been so certain he would die? The man reached the landing, and I sensed him turn towards the last flight. I braced myself. By lifting myself on the banisters I could use my feet.