“Telephone. Let’s get back to my office. That annoying woman may have held back on her clients but I had a good look at her blue supplies and deliveries book. There’s a laboratory whose name appeared two or three times last week. I’ll look up their address. They sent a courier to St. Catherine’s a couple of hours after Julia called by. I’ll see if I can trick some information out of them.”
JOE WAS GLAD Bacchus was driving an unmarked police car. No taxi driver would have agreed to venture out here. A squad car would have been stoned. He was down in the dark and dirt among the roots here all right.
“Well, this is it, Joe. Tower Bridge and civilisation behind us, the Highway and two miles of derelict port facilities in front. Half way between Wapping and Whitechapel. A stride or two away from the Thames. I bet Miss Frobisher hasn’t ventured out this far to check the credentials of her suppliers.”
“Not the back of beyond you might think. It’s minutes from the centre of London, access to the river and all the space you might need for little outlay. Number One, Waterman’s Reach, is what we’re looking for. This place was badly bombed in Zeppelin raids during the war. But I see signs of rebuilding. There! That’s it. That new place. Huge. Warehouse size. High windows, barred. I expect security’s a problem in these parts.”
Bacchus grunted. “Are they keeping crime out or crime in? That’s what we need to know. How are you going to find out?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Keep your hand in your pocket and look sinister.”
Joe banged heartily on the door.
The single man who greeted them claimed to be the manager, Mr. Kent. Joe noted he affected a flapping white surgical coat over his everyday clothes. He was young, too young to have been in the war, and brash with it. A Londoner. Unimpressed by Joe’s uniform or Bacchus’s expression, he asked cheerily how he might help them.
“We’re here to help you, Mr. Kent.” Joe gave him a dark smile. “We’re here to make sure you keep this business a going concern. Were you aware that your building is sited on the boundary line between Wapping and Whitechapel? It was redrawn after the bombings and there’s been some dispute. Upshot is—it’s been discovered that you’ve been paying local business taxes to one council when it should have been going to the other.”
“Naw! We’re in Wapping here. Always have been.”
“The Mayor’s office thinks otherwise. And Whitechapel is about to claim back ten years of unpaid rates. If you aren’t able to come up with the sum in question, I’m instructed to close you down until it can be sorted out. That could take six months. Plenty of time to become an ex-business.”
Kent’s hatchet features sharpened further. His eyes narrowed in understanding and disdain. “Aw! I get it! What’s your price? It’s the upper ranks running the protection rings now is it? Don’t you know the Fuzz have tried already? The Bow Street Boys? My boss saw them off right sharp. What the hell are you after?”
“Cooperation. First of all, a little information. Describe your business to me will you?”
They listened to a deliberately dull account of the world of pharmacological supplying, its successes and pitfalls, delivered in a high-pitched voice trying for a classy accent. An effort to impress? No. Joe decided: to belittle and annoy.
“And when I send a crew in to the rear part of these very large premises, they’ll find no substances I couldn’t with safety prescribe to my aunty?” Joe asked with mock innocence.
“Oh! That’s it! Now we’ve got there! That’s drug squad business. They turned us over last month. Don’t you talk to each other? Clean as a whistle. The kind of people we work with have no truck with that sort of nonsense.”
Joe improvised. “It’s the other sort of nonsense I’m interested in.”
“Not that again! The animals are perfectly happy. Until their moment comes, of course. But it’s in a good cause, I reckon. People see that.”
“What kind of animals?”
“Rabbits mainly. Used to be rats. No shortage of those round here.” He grinned. “But our clients are very picky—they require something more delicate, fluffier, less … rodent-like.” Into the astonished silence that greeted this, he went on, enjoying his moment: “The kind of ladies we deal with would run a mile at the thought that Thames rats were involved in the process. Though with supplies the way they are, when push comes to shove …”
“What is the time lag these days?” Joe broke in feeling his way through to the light that was dawning for him.
“That’s the thing! Everybody wants it instant. Used to be four, five days to develop an A-Z sample but these German blokes at St. Catherine’s have got it down to two days. They know their stuff! It’s all in the ears—the veins in the ears. Much easier to process. Our staff were never keen on doing the entrails. You ever looked inside a rat?”
“More times than you’ve had hot dinners, mate!” Joe tapped the ugly scar on his forehead, his memento of the trenches. “Sometimes they were our hot dinners. Now then—if you had a request for such a procedure on, say, this last Friday evening …?”
“Results Sunday night. We’re open all hours.”
“The request from St. Catherine’s last Friday. The one you picked’ up at nine o’clock. Do you have the results?”
“ ’Course. We phoned it through as instructed last night.”
“Result?”
Kent looked at him with truculence and suspicion. “Oh, no! Sorry. No can do. Can’t risk it. More than my job’s worth.”
Joe pushed a pile of papers from the desk onto the floor and dumped his briefcase in the space he’d created. He began to unbuckle the fastenings. “Then I must ask you to sign a few papers for the Mayor’s office and prepare to close down by … tomorrow. That’ll give you time to make arrangements for the livestock and we’ll be round with the blue and white tapes at midday. Pen, please, Superintendent?”
Bacchus offered his Mont Blanc with a flourish and began to dust down a square foot of desk top with his sleeve.
“Oh, bugger you! Positive. It was positive!” Struck by a sudden thought, Kent leered. “ ’Ere—are you the father? Is that what this is all about? It’s personal, innit? Well, sod you—you’ve no right coming down here bothering us. We never do personal. We’d get shut down. I’m going to report this to your superior!”
“Oh, yes?”
Kent at last began to count Joe’s stripes. He took a long assessing look at his gold braid, his war wound and his barely contained amusement, and shrugged. “Gawn! I’ll see you out, Guv.” And with an evil grin: “If I had a bleedin’ cigar, I’d treat you.”
“WELL, ARE YOU …?” Bacchus asked as they climbed back into the car.
“The father? Lord no!”
“Glad to hear it. I was going to say: are you ever going to tell me what the hell’s going on? What do the veins in the ears of some rabbit in the hands of that ghastly little tick have to do with affairs of state?”
“I begin to think—less and less. I wonder if there’s a personal aspect to all this that we’re missing, so blinded are we by the limelight of international conspiracy. Julia pregnant? That’s a thought to conjure with! But, according to Mr. Kent, the nine o’clock sample collected on Friday night gave a positive result thanks to their advanced testing procedures and that result has been duly reported. She knows.”
“I don’t believe it! That sweet little thing?” Bacchus was stunned.
“Have we been watching the same girl?”
THE TELEPHONE ON Joe’s desk rang at exactly eleven o’clock. Professor Reginald Stone declared himself and gave Joe five minutes to say his piece. He was not pleased to be caught between lectures. He listened to Joe’s request to recall once again the sequence of events between the finding of the gold coin and the stowing away in the colonel’s handkerchief, sighed and tutted in irritation.
“Thank you, sir. Commendably succinct,” Joe said, when he’d finished.