'Well,' said Barden. 'Let me know if you make any progress. I'll do the same. We might have a bit of luck.'
Devery and Hearn looked up local records, and they required their colleagues to search their memories for suspect garage proprietors, suspect scrap-metal merchants, and the like. They nosed around. They found nothing, but the chief of their department was able to present Scotland Yard with an account of inquiries made and inquiries in progress.
The depredations of the London safe-cutting gang continued, and the total of their gains became even more impressive. It was not difficult to imagine the ferment and frustration in the ranks of the Metropolitan Police.
But Detective Sergeant Devery was too valuable a man to be detached for ever on a foreign inquiry. He returned to his normal duties, leaving Hearn to follow up the thing alone. Hearn made little progress, but his reports showed that at least he was trying.
Nobody worried much. London was two hundred miles away from Granchester. To the average Englishman, born and bred on his small island, that was still a great distance.
2
In the criminal argot of London, oxy-acetylene is known as XXC. The gang of thieves which was giving Scotland Yard so much trouble was called 'the XXC mob' because the police had been unable to learn the name of any one of its members.
But the peculiar circumstances which led to the formation of the mob had really begun to arrange themselves some time before, when Howard Cain was sentenced to two years' imprisonment after the most agonizing piece of bad luck ever suffered by a self-respecting organizer of important crimes. And not only did it mean imprisonment, it meant dishonour.
Cain's misfortune occurred in a mews behind Park Lane, London, in the middle of the day. Happening to pass that way, he saw a wallet and picked it up. He found that it contained no money. He immediately realized that it had been rifled and discarded by a pickpocket. He threw it down as if it were hot, and he was seen to do so by two prowling detective officers, who are as thick as flies in that area. Both of them had a recollection of seeing his face in pictures. They picked up Cain, and then picked up the wallet. It had a monogram, and it contained visiting cards which were not in the name of Cain. Explanations were required, and for once in his life Cain told the truth. In the past he had often lied to the police, and occasionally his lies had been accepted because there was no evidence to the contrary. Now, with evidence wrongly interpreted, his true story was not believed. This was irony of the grimmest kind, and Cain's soul was in torment. Already he saw the newspaper comments, and the disgusted faces of his friends. He actually pleaded with the officers.
'I'm Howie Cain,' he said. 'I always stood up to what I done. Please don't take me for a lousy dip.'
The officers were not merciful. He was taken to West End Central police station and searched, and found to have a considerable sum of money in his pockets, and most of the money was in five-pound notes. He was detained. The owner of the wallet was sought and found. This person alleged that the wallet had contained seven five-pound notes, and that he had been relieved of it somewhere between the Dorchester Hotel and Hyde Park Corner. His times were right, Cain could have been the pickpocket. It was assumed that he had stolen the wallet and thrown it away after taking out the fivers and adding them to his own money-in-pocket.
At Cain's trial by Summary Jurisdiction the Magistrate believed this, and Cain was remanded in custody until the Quarter Sessions. At the sessions trial the jury also believed in his guilt, in spite of his counsel's efforts and his own vehement reiterations of the truth. After the verdict his long, bad record was read out, and the jury looked smug, more than ever convinced that their decision had been right. Fortunately the Recorder perceived that in all his criminal history Cain had never been detected in the act of Larceny from the Person. A faint doubt came into his mind, and he did not inflict the ten years' Preventive Detention which he had been considering. He gave Cain two years. After the verdict, and Cain's record, he could scarcely have given less.
Cain was still bitter when he came out of Wandsworth. He had heard of innocent men being sent down. He had also met men who claimed to be innocent, though he had not believed them. And now there he was, completely innocent, and nobody believed him.
'You shouldn't've tried it, Howie,' his sister's husband told him. 'It's not your line.'
Cain was furious, and if his brother-in-law had not been a noted tearaway he would have struck out, not blindly but with great force and accuracy. 'My own relations,' he cried in pain. 'My own relations putting me down for a bloody lousy whizz boy. I never lifted a wallet in my life. Not from nobody's pocket, anyway. God forbid I should ever do such a thing.'
His only comfort was his wife Dorrie. Whether or not she believed him, she pretended that she did. Probably the only chattel he had ever acquired honestly was Dorrie, and though he was not what is known as a good husband he freely admitted that his marriage was the best bargain he had ever made.
Dorrie's younger sister, Flo, was all right too. She said nothing at all. But then she never did say much about anything. She was a strange kid. She just seemed to drift along, neither interested nor bored, and really you couldn't understand what made her tick. Her only real characteristic was that she liked to imitate Dorrie and have the things Dorrie had. She was an attractive bit of stuff all the same, and nearly as good looking as Dorrie.
So Cain had two women in the house, and though they had survived in his absence, he found that there was no money in the kitty when he reached home. Flo was a good hoister. She had been known to walk out of a store wearing a lifted fur coat, as cool as she had been before she slipped the coat on. But Dorrie would not let Flo go on the hoist, except when there was absolutely nothing to put on the table. On these occasions nowadays she went with her, and they stole only groceries. 'Groceries!' Cain fumed. 'I ask you!'
Well, he was the breadwinner, and he went out full of big if vague ideas of making money, and showing 'em. That was very much in his mind. He was going to get his own back, and make the coppers sweat as he had sweated in Wandsworth. In this mood he ran into Edward James France, alias Jimmy the Gent, in a public house near Huston Station. Ned France listened as Cain talked, about big jobs, something like that £280,000 mail-van robbery, or like that industrial diamond tickle in Hatton Garden.
He had been with France in Wandsworth for a short time, and before that-some years before-in Pentonville. He thought that he was a curious character, a taciturn but by no means surly man who walked alone. He walked alone and yet he was not disliked. In prison he had given no allegiance to the various 'barons' and 'kings' among his fellows, and neither had he sought allegiance. He had not been afraid to defy those bullies when necessary, and yet he had been neither cut nor beaten.
Personality, Cain called it, and he meant that France carried an aura of able self-reliance, giving the impression that he would be a dangerous man if compelled to be. He had gained the respect of Cain, who in prison had soon made himself the leader of a ring, and a big man in the tobacco trade.
Cain was a big man; strong, tough, not yet forty, and very intelligent in his way. But now he watched with something like envy as France lit a cigarette and inhaled with deep satisfaction. He knew the signs. France, it appeared, had touched something recently. Temporarily at least, he was in comfortable circumstances. His manner and his double whisky proclaimed it.
Said Cain: 'I never saw you using snout when you were in the nick.'
France exhaled. 'I couldn't get enough, so I cut it out for the duration. There were things I needed more.'