Sir Basil frowned. He wasn’t a career policeman, of course. He had trained as a barrister and gone on to govern colonies and prisons before coming to the Yard only a few months earlier. Now in his early fifties, his face above the austere wing collar seemed as patchwork as his career: long and sleepy-eyed, it might belong to an undertaker, but the bulbous nose and full lips suggested he knew which coffin they kept the brandy in.
And nothing in face or career suggested he normally deferred to majors of the Indian Army.
“Or,” Dagner added, “I should have, with respect, to advise Gorman to remain silent – as I believe a lawyer would.”
Sir Basil decided to keep his authority in reserve and said cheerily: “Fine. By all means let us get to the truth of the matter. We know what happened at Brooklands, and you trailed this fellow up to town . . . Start from the moment you left this station.”
Dagner endorsed this with a tiny nod and O’Gilroy took the cigarette from his mouth and said: “They’d gone in round the back, so that’s the way I went. . .”
. . . to his surprise, the little courtyard was crammed with large lumps of stone, a half-finished statuette of the Virgin, and a litter of stone chippings. Presumably the sculptor lived in the other house. He made a half-bow to the figure in half-admission of what might be going to happen.
“So you went to the back door.” Sir Basil made a note. “And knocked?”
“Ye might say. ‘Twas locked so I kicked it in.” He paused – as he had once he was inside and half hidden in the shadow beside the staircase. It was a mean little house with cramped dimensions, patchily dark except for the lurid glow through a stained-glass panel in the front door. That lay straight ahead, at the bottom of the staircase whose top was right above him. And another door that must lead into a front room. He was familiar with houses of this size.
If there was anybody else in the place – and there had to be, since he could smell cooking – they must come and investigate the sound of the lock smashing. He kept his hand on the pistol in his pocket and waited.
Feet shuffled behind yet another door that led to the back of the house, and a small, fat man in an apron and large moustache peered out. He looked slowly from O’Gilroy to the broken door, and might have made a deduction if O’Gilroy had given him the time.
“Two fellers come in here ten minutes ago. Where’d they go?”
The fat face looked puzzled.
“Upstairs? Was they going upstairs?”
Perhaps the man didn’t understand English: even in the shadowed owed light, he looked foreign, quite apart from that apron. Indeed, the whole interior was foreign, from the smell to the dingy ornateness of the wallpaper and pictures.
O’Gilroy moved away, partly to get a view through the bannisters up the stairs, but also to relax the threat he posed and give the man space to yell . . . and he went off like a liner’s steam-whistle. But whatever the yell included, it couldn’t mention the pistoclass="underline" he hadn’t seen that.
A board creaked above and O’Gilroy flattened himself against the front-room door, feeling for the knob with his left hand, hiding his right hand with his body. Then a pair of feet showed at the top of the stairs, and he knew them.
“You knew his boots?” Sir Basil broke in.
“When yer shadowing a feller, ye take a good look at his boots. So when ye come close in a crowd, he don’t catch ye looking at his face, but ye know it’s him and which way he’s going from his boots.”
Dagner nodded approvingly. He might or might not know that boots trick, but he didn’t mind Sir Basil being reminded that he didn’t do his own legwork.
O’Gilroy went on: “If’n I can see his boots, I’m thinking he can see mine, so I got out me gun – the Captain’s revolver – and he comes down a coupla more steps and I can see he’s got a gun himself.”
It was the smaller man, the one who’d done the stabbing, and O’Gilroy came close to opening fire right then. But some errant streak of lawfulness took over and instead he turned the door-knob behind him and said loudly: “Police! Brooklands!” – reckoning the man must know those English words if no other ones.
The feet took another step down, the gun swivelled, and O’Gilroy ducked as he threw himself back into the room behind. Two shots splintered through the door after him, close as two eyes and at head height, so the man fancied himself as a marksman.
O’Gilroy yanked the door open again while the man would be off balance coming down the rest of the stairs and shot him. Twice into the body, tumbling him the rest of the way to sprawl on the front-door mat. But instead of lying there and quite probably surviving, he had to raise his gun, still unbeaten, still trying. In a flare of fury at having to do it, O’Gilroy shot him in the face from no more than six feet. And then, swearing aloud, hurried over to snatch the pistol.
He thought of the second man, but he was deaf from the gunfire in that cramped passageway, so the odds were stacking against him. Anyway, he didn’t have quite the same quarrel with that one. Waving a gun in each hand, he barged past the servant – who had his mouth open and might be yelling again, for all O’Gilroy could hear – and out of the back door . . .
“. . . and back to the police station,” he concluded. He took a drag at his cigarette.
And there you have it, Ranklin thought. Just another typical afternoon in the life of a typical Secret Service Bureau agent.
Only it wasn’t over yet. There was a faint flush on Sir Basil’s cheeks and a frown gathering above his eyes. He was, after all, supposed to be maintaining law and order in this capital of Empire.
Politely tentative, Dagner said: “That seems to me a fairly clear case of self-defence, since the other man fired first.”
Sir Basil ignored him. “Only you,” he looked at O’Gilroy, “were already, by your own admission, guilty of breaking and entering and the victim might – had he survived – have claimed he was simply defending his property.”
Ranklin asked: “Has he been identified?”
Sir Basil glanced at the Inspector, who said: “Not yet, sir. Nothing on the body that tells us.”
“Whoever he is – was – the fact remains that had you waited for my police to take the proper legal steps, none of this would have occurred.”
Ranklin said: “Even after Gorman got back, it still took a while to persuade your chaps to go along and have a look at the house. By which time the place seemed rather underpopulated. And I could have identified the second man as one I’d seen trying to follow the Senator from his hotel last week.”
Sir Basil checked with a report on the table. “All you found was a cook who speaks no English and an old man living upstairs – the householder?”
He looked again at the Inspector, who waggled his features and said: “It’s difficult to be sure of things like that in those places, sir.”
“Quite so . . . Who’d heard shots but says he’s never seen the man before and so on . . . Is this usual with that community?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. Very close they stick, rather sort things out themselves.”
“I understand.” Then Sir Basil frowned. “But damn it, this is London, not the back streets of Naples. I will not have . . .” he gestured comprehensively but vaguely and finished: “. . . such things.” And topped it off with a glare at O’Gilroy.
Now Ranklin saw what the local police had been waiting and hoping for: that the house would be empty not only of witnesses but that embarrassing corpse as well. Blood-stains and bullet-holes could be shrugged off as long as nobody made a complaint. But not a body.
After a moment, Dagner suggested gently: “I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that, since Gorman began by seeing this man stab the Senator at Brooklands, and ended by giving himself up at this station, and there are no witnesses to what happened in between, why should we doubt his word? Particularly with the evidence of the bullet-holes and the man’s pistol. Quite apart from any Other Factors.”