“I dessay,” Siggings muttered, glancing sideways furtively at Shaw’s face. He was already close to breaking point, scared as a kitten on a tree-top. “But it was an accident. I told you.”
“So you did. Well, we’ll drop the point for now. There are other matters I’m also interested in, as it happens.” He paused, looking closely at Siggings, his gun pressing hard into the man’s side. “I would very much like to know if you’ve ever had any contacts with Red China since the old days?”
Siggings went a shade whiter. “Course I haven’t,” he muttered. He wiped a hand across his nostrils. “I dunno what you mean.”
“Like hell you don’t, but if you insist, I’ll be more explicit,” Shaw said in a hard voice, his face close to Siggings’s. “To me, you fit beautifully. Links with the Chinese Communists in the past. Links, as I’m told on good authority, with disaffected and dangerous Coloured elements to-day. There happens to be another link between those two camps besides yourself, Siggings, and they call it the Dead Line. Now — what do you know about that?”
He snapped it out suddenly. He had been watching Siggings’s face and he saw the instant reaction… the bloodless, yellow look of real terror — and he knew he had struck oil. “What do you know about that?” he asked again. “Let’s have it all, no holding back. Play along with me and the past can stay buried, Siggings… we smashed the organization behind the attempt to make use of REDCAP and that’s all that need matter to me. And I’m willing to overlook to-day’s little business — on certain conditions. Understand?”
Siggings muttered, “I don’t know a thing, honest.”
“Come off it,” Shaw said crisply. “If you don’t start talking inside sixty seconds, I’m taking you right to the Special Branch. That’s if I don’t feel an overwhelming urge to kill you myself first. That urge is coming on pretty strongly at the moment.”
Siggings broke after forty-five seconds.
His cheeks had gone grey and there was the shine of sweat on them, and his voice was a terrified whine. Shaw knew for a certainty that the man was telling the simple truth when he insisted he hadn’t taken part in any Dead Line operations; he was far too scared to chance his luck on a lie now. He admitted he’d been in the pay of Red China since jumping ship in Melbourne and that he had been forced to carry out commissions for the Communists whenever orders had come through; he had, he told Shaw, no idea as to who his immediate bosses were nor whence his orders or his remuneration came. The whole thing was very highly organized, he said unnecessarily, and his orders, made up of words and letters cut from printed pages and stuck on the paper, reached him through the post with his name and address printed on gummed labels. Each time there was a different postmark and no sender’s address was ever given. Money in pound notes reached him the same way and, though clearly they must have some way of checking on him, he had never once set eyes on his paymasters. And then, a few months ago, he had received orders to be outside a public house called The Chestnut Tree in Notting Hill half an hour after closing time. He had obeyed this order just as he had obeyed all others and precisely at the appointed time a Rover had driven up and a man with a hat pulled well down had got out and stuck a flick-knife in his ribs and told him to get in the car. As soon as he was in a black bag had been pulled over his head. After a drive that had lasted an estimated hour and a half, the car had stopped and he had been bundled out, still with the bag over his his head, and taken to a building where he was told that, on account of his work in the docks, he would be in a good position to assist in the operation of getting dead bodies out of the country for reasons unspecified; he would be required to assist only by passing back information concerned with the species and times of arrival of outward cargoes in the docks by road transporter, details of dock security, police routines, nightwatchmen’s habits and so on, and would also be required to give information about any of his work-mates who might themselves be useful to his bosses. That, at any rate for the time being, was all. He was told nothing about the actual operational procedure of the Dead Line and he never saw who was speaking; the black bag was in place the whole time and there was a knife in his back throughout. When the man had finished talking, Siggings had been taken back to the car and driven close to home. Since then he had passed odd pieces of information back, each time to a different man at a different rendezvous, but had never been called upon for physical help.
“You didn’t think,” Shaw asked when Siggings had done, “of taking any car numbers?”
“No. Wouldn’t have done me much good to do that, would it?”
Shaw’s hand tapped the driving wheel and his gun nudged Siggings harder. He said, “D’you know something? I don’t believe you told me quite all the man said to you that first night. It’s just a funny little feeling I have, Siggings, and it’s bothering me a lot. Until that funny little feeling’s satisfied I’m not letting you off the hook, so go on wriggling.”
Siggings licked his lips.
Shaw could feel the shake in the man’s puny body; he was like a blancmange. There was undoubtedly more to come. Siggings was whining again. “I can’t tell you any more. If I do they’ll get me. They’ll get me for sure. The man who talked to me… he said that. He said a West Indian got stinko one night in a pub and started boasting about what he was working on… he needn’t have worried about a hangover because next morning he was dead. He’d been taken down a narrow sort of alley near this pub, see, and a knife had been used on him and he was slit almost all the way up the guts so he had his last meal hanging out. If I say anything that gives a lead, they’re going to see that something like that happens to me.…”
“Let me tell you,” Shaw said briefly, “that they, whoever they are, will never, never know… at least, not till they’re in the bag themselves. With you laughing like crazy because you’re free of them for good.”
Siggings shook his head vehemently. “They’ll know! They’ve got spies everywhere, I reckon. I tell you… they’ll know!”
“Risk it!” Shaw snapped. “If I have to take you in, you’re definitely going to cough up the lot, I assure you. If you tell me now, of your own free will, it’ll count in your favour. You really haven’t any choice, Siggings.”
Siggings’s face crumpled and he began to cry like a woman. “All right,” he said after a while. “That bloke told me the Dead Line was controlled from the States… Harlem, he said. He couldn’t give me any detailed orders till they came through from there, from higher up. He mentioned some bloke he called the President.”
“Of the United States, I presume?”
“Funny, aren’t you?” Siggings muttered.
“What I’m after,” Shaw pointed out, “is a name, rather than a title.”
“I never heard any names, honest! I’ve told you all I know.”
“Ha, ha.”
Siggings said despairingly, “All right, — you! There was something else I heard this bloke say when I was being taken out of the place again. I didn’t catch it all, and you can believe that or not just as you like. I don’t s’pose it’s got anything to do with what you want anyway, and—”
“What did he say, Siggings?”
Siggings answered surlily, “I was just going to tell you. He said something about a kitten—”
“A kitten?”
“Yes, a kitten. It was a something kitten, I think… I told you, I didn’t catch it properly. It was to do with New York, that’s all I know.”
“A kitten in New York?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“It sounds crazy to me.”