XXI
Although perhaps the most spectacular, in reality the most simple of the problems that arise at Scotland Yard is the pursuit of a known man for a known crime. A criminal may escape if there is nothing to link him with an offence, but once a link is established it is long odds that, hide where he may, pursuit will catch up with him at last. The whole world is aroused to the hue and cry. He may disguise himself, he may flee to the ends of the earth, but even if persistent methodical search fails to reveal him, some chance will almost to a certainty lead to his betrayal.
Harry Labar’s perspective, from his closeness to affairs, was not quite so clear in this matter as Winter’s. That veteran did not conceal his satisfaction at the manner in which the investigation was developing.
“You’ve got Larry Hughes out into the open at last, my boy,” he said. “All you have to do now is to worry him. Keep him on the run. Things are coming your way. Don’t let any slack fit come along and spoil it all.”
“Yes, sir.” Labar received the compliment with meekness. It was something anyway to get a compliment out of the Chief Constable. “But we haven’t got anything yet that will associate him with the robbery. Stebbins may help us to get at Billy Bungey. There is Mrs. Gertstein. There is Gold Dust Teddy. So far we’re to the good. But we haven’t got the solid evidence yet that will lead to a conviction of the main guy. He’s slippery as an eel and you know it, sir.”
Winter chuckled. “Don’t come that on me, Labar. Trying to establish an alibi in case things go wrong, are you? Going to get all the little fish and let the big one slip through the net? Same old story about Larry. Well, it doesn’t go down with me. You’ve got to get Larry. See if you can’t get him for the Gertstein job, hook him up for the ‘Maid’s Retreat’ trouble. Only get him.”
“I’m going to get him, sir,” returned the inspector, with an inflection in his voice that caused Winter to glance at him shrewdly through his spectacles. “I’ve just a little personal feeling in this matter, and I’m going through with it.”
Winter was looking idly at the ceiling. “Nice girl that Miss Noelson, they tell me,” he said absently. “Doesn’t always do to mix sentiment up with our business, though, Labar.”
A slight tinge of colour crept under the tinge of Labar’s tan. He wondered how the other had got to learn of something that he felt was a secret rigorously locked in his own breast. Perhaps the Chief was only guessing. “I don’t know much about the young lady,” he returned. “She’s a nice girl, as you say. But you can rely that nothing will interfere with my duty.”
The thin relic of a smile still loitered about the Chief Constable’s lips as he nodded. “Don’t mind an old hand giving you a hint, do you? There’s another thing. When does Myson get back from his holidays?”
Myson was a detective inspector who had not yet reached divisional rank, who was the senior of the C.I.D. men in Labar’s division. Labar consulted a pad.
“Ought to be back in a week’s time,” he said. “He offered to come back when this thing broke, but I didn’t think it was worth while bothering him.”
“He’s got a pretty sound idea of how things are in your division I take it?”
“I think so.”
“Right. Wire him to come back at once. He’ll have to take charge of all matters here. After this you’ll play a lone hand on this job. You’ll want your mind free of everything else if you’re going to play the game out with Larry.”
The divisional inspector looked a little doubtfully at his chief. “I hope you don’t think that—”
“That you can’t run the division, and handle this case too. I do think so. I don’t want you to fall between two stools. You want your mind free for this business now it’s got so far. You’re still the divisional inspector here, but Myson will act until you want to take the reins. Go and find where Larry’s hideout is and it won’t matter whether you are away a week or a month.”
“That certainly ought to make it simpler,” said Labar, and with a curt and not unfriendly nod the Chief Constable was gone.
Labar drew up the copy for a double crown poster headed with the sinister big black letters affected by the police for bills of this kind—“Wanted.”
Then with such skill in portraiture as he possessed, added to the scientific formula for these matters, he drew a word picture of Billy Bungey, and sent the resulting composition along to the Criminal Record Office with the request that any amendments might be made and a photograph added if possible, before it was sent to the printing department which is one of the subsidiary departments of the Yard.
He dictated a wire to Myson, and began clearing his desk with a mind from which a weight had been lifted. For there was no denying, as Winter had said, that the Larry Hughes business was one that ought to demand his full attention. In the normal way it would have gone to a chief inspector, who would have had no other duties to distract his mind while the case lasted.
That done Labar sat down to study a large scale map of the southeastern corner of England. He had sound reasons for supposing that Hughes was somewhere in that angle formed by Kent and Sussex. The Rolls Royce car in which Penelope Noelson had been abducted, had been traced for many miles along the Hastings road. Larry’s dash to London and to “Maid’s Retreat” convinced the detective that the hiding place wherever it might be was within a hundred miles from London. He explored the map with his forefinger. There were dozens of places along remote roads where concealment might be effective. But Labar washed out a great many of these as improbable. He had already circularised the police forces of the area in which he felt that the fugitives might be located. Larry had been using his car, and a Rolls Royce in a country lane would be even more conspicuous to a village constable, than the same car on one of the main roads. Labar had a list of every Rolls Royce that had been seen about the area he was searching since Larry’s flight. Those of which the numbers had been taken had for the most part been identified, and wiped out. There remained several which might or might not have been Larry’s.
There had been five such cars seen on the Folkestone—Rye road. One constable reported that a shepherd on the Romney Marshes had told him of a big car—which the police officer believed might have been a Rolls Royce—seen twice on a derelict stretch of road leading into the marshland.
Labar bent his mind to this point. It seemed the most promising of all to start from, although it might, as so often happens in these cases where a man is acting more or less on guess work, prove nothing but a mare’s nest. But if a man wanted to keep out of the way what better place of refuge could he find than these same desolate Romney Marshes.
With Myson in charge at Grape Street, other ends of the investigation in London could for the while be left to themselves. Labar decided that with two men he could rake the district as effectively and more quietly than if he had a dozen. If his guess was right, it would not do to disturb Larry.
That evening, with a suitcase and a bag of golf clubs, he descended on the medieval town of Rye. A golfer or an artist would find himself entirely without question at the ancient Cinque Port Town. For his own purposes Harry Labar was a naturalist as well as a golfer, and he proposed to examine the flora and fauna of the marshes with some precision ere he returned to town.
He did not go to one of the old hostelries where visitors might have become curious and friendly. He took humble lodgings at the house of a retired Metropolitan police constable who might be relied upon to keep his mouth shut in any circumstances. Also it is regrettable to record that Labar’s first night in town was spent in the cheaper kind of four ale bars in the society of local shop assistants, shepherds, and watermen. They found the gentleman from London, whose name it was disclosed was James May, an hospitable and genial person with a thirst for information about the districts that lie northeast of Rye which was not easily assuaged.
It was six o’clock the next morning when an unshaven man clad in a rough old suit of Harris tweeds, who might have been a tramp or a naturalist set out through the old town gate in the general direction of Folkestone. A burly man in a decrepit Ford car passed him just outside the Ypres Tower. It was Malone also setting out on the search for a needle in a haystack. No sign of recognition passed between the two men. Labar trudged on and in the course of the next hour was overtaken by an early charabanc on its way to Folkestone. He stopped it and bought a lift for half a dozen miles or so.
He had no fixed plan. If anything came of this excursion luck would have to be with him. Away on his right he could see mile after mile of flat country cut into patterns by a complicated series of dykes, and save for a rare farmhouse or cottage almost void of any indication of human inhabitants.
At a point which he had marked on a small pocket map he descended. He was some few miles from Lydd, but across the wide stretches of marsh and cornland there was only one low and inconspicuous building which a weather-beaten sign announced as an inn, “Licensed to sell by retail wines, spirits, beer and tobacco.” How it might find sufficient customers to support it in that forsaken region Labar did not stop to inquire. He had already had breakfast, but that was two hours agone and an able-bodied detective can always support two breakfasts in the course of his duty. Anyway it was too early in the day for any other pretext to serve.
An old, old man pottering about the garden was very dubious. The inn did not lay itself out much for early meals. However if mister could put up with tea and eggs he would consult his wife as to what might be done.
Tea and eggs it appeared were the very things for which the wayfarer had an inordinate craving. He was afforded a seat in the one bare public room that the inn boasted, while an old lady with crinkled cheeks began to fussily spread a somewhat stained cloth, and to issue instructions to the old man who was boiling the eggs in the adjoining room.
“A lonely neighbourhood this,” observed the inspector idly.
“There be worse,” said the woman. “Mind ye, John, to keep an eye on the clock. Them eggs should be on not a mite longer than two and a half minutes. Yes, there be more lonely places than this. Out there on the marsh”—she jerked a thumb backwards over her shoulder—“there be places where you won’t see a human soul week in and week out. Here we get plenty of company, what with the lookers and the traffic on the road. We’ve lived here nigh on forty years and we ain’t got no complaint. Leastways its bad for the rheumatics sometimes, and my old man there he has a touch of ague.”
She bustled out with the remark that she couldn’t trust that durned old fool to look at the clock, and continued the conversation through the open door.
“Reckon you’ll be making for Folkestone. ’Tis a tidy walk.”
“No. I’m staying at Rye. I’ve come out to have a walk over the marshes.”
She loomed out a bulky figure framed in the doorway. “Then you baint lookin’ for work? You be a visitor? A gentleman?”
“I’m what they call a naturalist. I want to have a look at the plants and birds and things round about. I thought of walking across towards Dungeness.”
She cocked her hands on her hips. “I know what a naturalist is,” she said nodding wisely. “You pick slimy things out of the dicks and keep ’em in little bottles. We’ve had gentlemen out here before like that. Lor-a-mussy, John, them eggs will be as hard as bricks.”
In a panic she flung back into the kitchen, and presently she set his meal before him.
“You baint thinkin’ of trying to walk straight across, be you?” she asked. “You’ll be in a turble tangle if you do. Like as not, you’ll lose yourself. Looks clear enough, but, when you get out in it, you’ll find dicks and sluices and whatnot, all ravelling you up like. Then as you get out near the Ness you’ll find the walking not too good.”
Labar swallowed a mouthful of hard-boiled egg. “I can find a road, I suppose.”
She shook her head. “They baint what you might call proper roads. Rough tracks most of ’em.”
“Not good enough for a motor car, eh?”
She considered doubtfully. “I’ve knowd cars use some of ’em. But they do tell me as they shake the innards all up.”
He led her to a discussion on the topography of the marshes in which the old man came and joined. By the time his breakfast was finished he had extracted much information that might be indirectly useful in his quest, but nothing bearing directly upon it. The only point that they were unanimous upon was that it was a foolhardy thing for a stranger to explore the marshes without a guide. It was odds that if he persisted he would have to spend a night in the “hand-cold” and mist-sodden atmosphere.
Laughingly he waved aside their warnings and since one road was like another for his purpose set off across the nearest marsh track in the general direction of Dungeness. An hour’s walking on the lonely wastes convinced him that the old folk knew what they were talking about. His map and pocket compass helped him only vaguely, for as he branched into deeper recesses there were twists and tangles, tracks that came to an abrupt nothingness, and unexpected watercourses that barred his way. Once or twice he located himself by the aid of occasional “lookers,” as the shepherds of the district are locally known. After all, it did not much matter whether he went in one direction or another. He wished there were more shepherds. If there had been a big motor car traversing these rough tracts one or the other of them would surely have seen it.
Many hours went by, however, and all his inquiries met with negative result. He was by now completely lost. An hour had gone since he had seen a living soul and he sat down to eat a sandwich, with which he had had the forethought to provide himself, and to consider the position.
He was tired and the sun was hot. He stretched himself for a short nap after his frugal repast. When he awoke he glanced at his watch and swore to himself as he realised that he had slept for over two hours.
He stood up and stretched himself, and then suddenly dropped at full length in the coarse grass and stared intently across the marsh about which a slight haze was already beginning to rise.
Something less than a mile away a car was slowly making its way. The distance was too great for him to discern anything more than that it was a big saloon, but he had not the slightest doubt that it was the very car that he was seeking. It was utterly improbable that any other would be risking its springs in this desolate region.
He lay very still till the motor disappeared from sight. Then he took a compass bearing to the point at which he had seen it. He stuck his stick in the ground and tied a handkerchief to it, to afford him a very necessary point from which to work, for by now he knew that it might cost him three miles of roundabout walking to make his way to the spot even though it was under a mile away in a straight line. Then he set off.
Again and again he had to retrace his steps, to find some way of crossing the many dykes, and he was duly thankful that he had had the intelligence to make an improvised flag which afforded him a definite clue to his starting point in the dreary sameness of the marsh. Something over an hour of tedious walking it took him to cover the distance. At last a hazardous journey over a slimy plank brought him to a narrow and almost imperceptible roadway. And there imprinted on the turf were the slight but unmistakeable tyre marks of a big motor car.
Labar whistled cheerfully as he bent to examine them.