Dennis Wheatley - Contraband

At eight o'clock the manager of the hotel called them in person, inquired most kindly after their health, and superintended the preparations for an excellent meal ordered by Sir Pellinore, to be served in their room.

They both felt terribly stiff, but apart from that, and the soreness under their arms, perfectly fit and well again after their thirteen hours in bed. Dressing proved a painful operation, but once it was accomplished and they had been heartened by a good dinner, washed down with a fine bottle of Burgundy, they felt as keen as ever. A car was waiting for them when they came downstairs and they caught the 9.8 to London; arriving at Charing Cross two minutes before midnight.

At the Yard all preparations for the secret raid had been completed. Mitbloom & Allison proved to be a firm of wholesale tobacco merchants. Their warehouse, so the Superintendent had ascertained, was fitted with electric burglar alarms but they did not employ a night watchman. Arrangements had been made for the electric current to be cut off at the main between the hours of one and three so that the police would be able to make an entry without the alarm going off and, unless they were very unfortunate, no one would suspect on the following day that the place had been searched in the early hours of the morning.

The Superintendent, Gregory, Gerry Wells, a lock expert from the special department, and another detective, squeezed themselves in one of the bigger Flying Squad cars at a quarter to one, and the driver turned its nose eastward.

They ran down the Strand which was still fairly busy with traffic passing to and from the great restaurants; Fleet Street, now given over to swift moving newspaper vans lining up to collect and distribute the early copies of the great national dailies; then up Ludgate Hill and through Queen Victoria Street, strangely silent and deserted compared with the swarming thousands who throng those great business areas in the day time. Passing the Bank of England, they sped on to Liverpool Street, then turned right, into that maze of thoroughfares into which the wealthier population of London and the suburbs so rarely penetrate.

Barter Street proved to be a dark canyon between high brick buildings. It contained no residential houses and was given over entirely to tall warehouses; some of which had dusty looking old-fashioned offices on the ground floor. Dustbins lined the pavements; a solitary cat minced its way forward in leisurely manner across the street upon its nightly prowl.

They parked the car at the end of the street leaving the driver with it. A city policeman touched his helmet to the Superintendent, having been warned of their visit, and remained on the corner to keep watch while the others made their way along the narrow pavement to number forty-three.

Grimy window panes stared at them blankly from the street level; above, the big hook and ball of a crane for hauling merchandise to the upper floors dangled over their heads. The Superintendent looked at his watch.

'Five past one. Go ahead, Jim,' he said.

The lock expert produced a bag of tools and, selecting one, started work on the door. 'Lock's easy enough,' he murmured. 'Old-fashioned piece.' With a twist of his wrist it clicked back into its socket.

Pushing the door open the five men entered the building. The Superintendent switched on his torch. It showed a dusty hallway with a flight of stone steps leading to the upper floors and, on their left, two glass panelled swing doors giving on to the offices. Thrusting them wide the fat Superintendent led the way in.

The beam of his torch, as he flashed it round, showed shelves with rows of faded letter files upon them; an old-fashioned clerk's desk, with high stools in front of it, and a rusty brass rail which carried a number of leather-bound ledgers. The place had the odour of dreary old-fashioned commercialism where men toiled half their lives in a perpetual twilight for a pittance. Another door with a frosted glass panel, upon which was painted 'Private' in black letters, showed to the right. The Superintendent walked over and tried its handle. The lock expert set to work again and soon had it open.

The inner office was little better than the one they had just glanced over. It gave on to a deep well, and was lit in the day time only by glass reflectors swung on chains at an angle to the windows. A few faded photographs of elderly side whiskered gentlemen, probably long dead directors of the firm, were hung upon the whitewashed walls above a skirting of pitch pine. A roll top desk occupied a corner near the window; a meagre square of turkey carpet failed to conceal all but a small portion of the worn oilcloth with which the floor was covered. An open bookcase contained piles of old trade journals, samples, and miscellaneous paraphernalia.

'We'll come back here later,' said the Superintendent. 'First I want to see the contents of the warehouse.'

They trooped out behind him and up the stone stairs to the first floor. It was an empty barn like room; containing only several stacks of cases. The Superintendent pointed: Wells and the extra detective pulled one out from the middle of a stack, and, by means of a jemmy which the lock man produced from his bag of tools, opened it up. It was a longish coffin shaped case and contained tins of leaf tobacco.

They hammered back the nails carefully, so that it should not appear to have been opened, and replaced it in the centre of the stack.

The contents of four other cases were investigated from different portions of the room and the Superintendent noted down particulars of the goods they contained in his pocket book. Then they visited the upper floor and the same process was gone through with other consignments of merchandise which they found there. The top floor and the one below it were empty.

'We'll get down to the offices now,' the Superintendent said and, with an elephantine tread, led the way downstairs again.

They all had torches and began a rapid search through the clerks' desks and papers. It was impossible to examine them all in so short a time but the police officers made various notes of invoices, addresses, and dates of correspondence, without coming across a single item which tied up the place with its illegal source of supply.

Gregory wandered into the inner room. If there were any, it was there, he felt certain, that important papers would be kept.

The lock expert had already opened the roll top desk and the Superintendent had gone carefully through it without finding any papers other than those connected with apparently legitimate business. Gregory stared round the place, scrutinising the photographs upon the grey white walls and the miscellaneous collection of samples and trade papers, hoping for inspiration. Then his eye fell upon the lower shelf of the bookcase.

Half buried under stacks of dusty documents there were a long row of books. He bent down and flashed his torch on them. It was a set of Shakespeare's works in forty volumes. As a book collector himself he knew it well. It had been published by an American company, just after the war, and remained at an exceptionally low price. The volumes were bound in grey boards with a strip of blue cloth down their spines on which were paper labels. Each contained one of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, except the last three, which were devoted to the sonnets and poems.

He stared at them for a moment; thinking how queer it was that the owner of this grim business office should be sufficiently interested in Shakespeare to keep a set in his depressing work room. Then he noticed that whereas the tops of thirty-nine volumes were grey with dust, the fortieth, number sixteen in the set, was comparatively clean and stood out a little from the others as though it had been recently used and hastily put back.