Ransom Town Read online

  Definite, pertinent statements of fact were investigated as soon as possible. ‘Look, I live in Anywhere Road and last night I saw my neighbour pouring liquid from a petrol can into a bottle. Isn’t that how Molotov cocktails are made? . . .’ The neighbour was visited by a policeman and in the nicest possible way he was asked to explain what he had been doing. Any generalized allegation was noted and filed, but probably not immediately investigated. ‘I live next to a bloke who’s always messing about with chemicals. The papers keep saying the blackmailers are probably using chemicals to start the fires and I just wondered . . .’ The obvious cranks were given short shrift. ‘It’s punishment for our sins. The Lord is going to root out evil with the sword of fire. . . .’

  The volume of calls increased until it threatened to overwhelm the running of the operations room: to the men who answered them it seemed as if a phone couldn’t be on its cradle for thirty seconds before it began to ring once more.

  Men and women, from the lowest ranks to the highest, worked their shifts and then carried on, careless about time as they struggled to identify their quarry.

  And men in high office debated the agonizing question – at what moment in time would the threat become so deadly that the ransom would have to be paid?

  *

  His mood resentful, Kerr walked briskly along the well-lit pavement past large Victorian and Edwardian houses which had all been converted into either offices or flats. He’d wanted to stay on at the station, working with the others, but Fusil had told him to interview ‘Peggy’ and when he’d queried the reasonableness of wasting more time on that case, Fusil had torn him off a hell of a strip for insubordination. The D.I.’s main fault, he thought, was that he couldn’t let go of a case which had defeated him, not even when something more important came to hand. So Hanna had visited a Tom from time to time . . . Did the identity of the traitor at the bank now matter a fig when a mob were threatening mass murder?

  Number fourteen was a huge pile of a building, looking oppressive in the shadows cast by the street lighting, as if behind its walls there worked faceless people who believed in states, not individuals. Inside the large porch, however, this suggestion was seen to be false because the two rows of buttons and name cards spoke of the lonely world of bachelor flats, not the inhumanly cold world of the bureaucrat.

  He checked the name cards and then pressed the push to number five – Peggy Lea. A woman’s voice asked through the grill: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Hi, Peggy. Are you free?’

  There was a buzz from behind the stout front door and when he pushed, it opened. There was a long hall, lit by an unshaded light, with four doors along its length and near the end a beautifully proportioned staircase which curled round to the right.

  Number five was on the first floor. He rang the bell and a blonde, dressed in a frock which was interesting without being too obvious, opened the door. She studied him. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘We can’t be lucky all the time.’

  She summed him up with professional skill. ‘I’m busy. Find someone else. . . .’

  ‘C.I.D.’ He stepped inside.

  She called him several unladylike names.

  They stood in a large room which was bedroom to the right and sitting-room to the left. Two doors led off this and one of them gave access to a tiny kitchen.

  ‘What the hell d’you want?’ she demanded.

  She looked young and yet she looked old. Twenty-one or two, he finally guessed. If she toned down the make-up she might pass as reasonably innocent, provided only that she remembered to keep smiling and didn’t let her mouth draw into a hard, straight line.

  ‘You’ve no right to come busting in.’

  ‘Me bust in? You invited me.’ When he’d first started work he’d felt sorry for all prostitutes, seeing them in the traditional light of women forced by financial circumstances into a sordid occupation. But experience had taught him that there were almost as many motives for turning prostitute as there were prostitutes and some of these motives allowed very little room for sympathy.

  She walked over to a battered occasional table and picked out a cigarette from a brass box. She lit the cigarette and went over to the single armchair and slumped down in it. ‘I’ve not done anything.’

  ‘Relax. I’ve only come for some information. D’you recognize the name of Steven Hanna?’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘How much d’you know about him?’

  ‘He’s a friend. That’s all.’

  ‘Is he a good payer?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Does he pay you well for entertaining him?’

  ‘Who the hell d’you think I am?’

  Kerr grinned. ‘How much, how often, and since when?’

  She swore, then stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray that was already half full. ‘He’s feeble,’ she said contemptuously. ‘When they were handing out backbones he got in the wrong queue.’

  ‘If you’d ever met his wife, you’d be more charitable.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Took me two hours to thaw out afterwards.’

  ‘He says she’s a real bitch. All the marrieds talk like that.’

  ‘In his case it’s the understatement of the year.’

  She lit another cigarette.

  ‘Is he a regular punter?’

  ‘You could call him that.’

  ‘So how often does he come a-punting?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Twice a month, maybe. Not up to any more,’ she added spitefully.

  ‘And what’s he pay?’

  She was silent.

  ‘Come on, don’t be bashful.’

  ‘Ten quid.’

  ‘For the two visits?’

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said, with sudden anger. ‘I’m not a bloody back-street scrubber.’

  ‘So he’s paying you twenty quid most months?’

  She nodded.

  Five pounds a week was surely not enough to have turned Hanna into a traitor? Or had he escaped from his wife the previous night and phoned Peggy to tell her what her answers must be? ‘Most blokes with a frozen shark of a wife would want to visit someone as pretty as you much more often than twice a month.’

  ‘There’s no call to be bloody sarky.’

  ‘Sarky? If it weren’t that I’ve only been married for a short time . . .’ He did not finish. The implied compliment was crude, but he’d never met a Tom who could resist a compliment. ‘Are you sure it’s been only twice a month?’

  ‘He said he couldn’t afford to visit any more. But if you ask me, two’s his limit.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking he’s a bit of a masochist?’

  ‘He’s straight.’ She spoke with professional pride. ‘If he weren’t, it’d be more than ten quid.’

  She sounded truthful, but life must have taught her to lie convincingly. That this was so was proved after a buzzer sounded. She looked at him.

  ‘Tell him you’re busy.’

  ‘Aren’t you ever bloody well moving?’ She stood up, crossed to the small wall microphone, asked who the caller was, and said that she’d only just got back from shopping and must have a bath and would he call back in half an hour’s time. She returned to her chair.

  ‘I hope you don’t have to put him off a second time,’ said Kerr.

  ‘I’ve nothing more to say to you. Why won’t you go?’

  ‘I will, just as soon as I’m convinced there really is nothing more you can tell me.’ He stretched out his legs towards the gas fire and settled more deeply into the chair.

  She told him what she thought of the law, the police force, and people who stopped an honest girl from working.

  He smiled cheerfully.

  ‘For God’s sake, mister, clear out and leave me. I don’t know nothing more about him, I swear I don’t.’ She spoke with resentful hopelessness If he decided to stay because he thought she was holding back information, the whole of the rest of the evenin
g would be ruined and in just over an hour she was expecting a customer who paid her very much more than ten pounds for a visit. She stood up, stubbed out the cigarette, went over to a small sideboard and brought out a bottle of gin. ‘D’you want a drink?’

  ‘I’ve never been known to refuse.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ She poured out two drinks, handed him a glass. She drank quickly. ‘Look, mister, if I . . .’ She stopped and stared at him. ‘Suppose I tell you something interesting, will you clear out then?’

  ‘It’s to do with Hanna?’

  ‘No.’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Mister, I keep telling you, I don’t know nothing more about him. But I want you out. So if I tell you this, will you go?’

  He had become convinced that she was telling the truth and therefore there was nothing to be lost by accepting her offer. ‘O.K., I’m listening.’

  ‘There’s been a bloke in Ribstowe who’s supposed to have croaked himself. I was talking to a friend and he said the bloke didn’t croak himself, he was croaked because he was trying to black somebody big.’

  ‘Who’s the big man?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  She shook her head. ‘If he knew I’d grassed, he’d work me over until I wouldn’t recognize myself.’

  *

  ‘Mickey was blacking, was he?’ said Fusil. He looked across the desk which was strewn with the morning’s mail and crime reports. ‘Who was he blacking and why and who told her?’

  ‘She swears she doesn’t know any of the answers and she won’t name who told her because he’ll carve her up if he ever learns she’s talked to us.’

  Fusil scrumpled up a circular and threw it at the wastepaper basket: he missed. The phone rang and the message was brief. He yawned, ran his right hand over his hair in a gesture of tiredness, and then said: ‘Mickey was a small-time crook, a layabout cadging from his mates and his landlady. So would a man like him ever get mixed up in something strong enough to warrant his being rubbed out?’

  ‘He did have all that money on him and normally he was skint.’

  ‘Fifty-two quid doesn’t make for much of a black, does it?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t realize how big the job was.’

  Fusil scratched the side of his face, screwing up his mouth as he did so. ‘Or maybe the Tom got rid of you the easiest way she could think of.’

  ‘I naturally wondered about that at the time, but I decided she was giving it to me straight.’

  Fusil had learned to accept Kerr’s judgements – or at least those which didn’t contradict his own. ‘O.K. Start digging. Trace out who he could have been trying to black – check back on past criminal associates – and look for more money. If the blacking was strong enough for Mickey to be killed, then surely he must have known it was big and wouldn’t have settled for a mere fifty-two quid?’

  Kerr hesitated. ‘It’ll keep a bit, won’t it, until I’ve given a hand in the ops room?’

  ‘Is that a discreet way of volunteering to do some extra work on a Sunday?’

  Kerr grinned. ‘I reckon it must be.’

  ‘God knows, then, things must be desperate!’

  *

  The house was one of fifteen, erected ten years before in a close. Built partially on the open plan, it had large picture windows, double-glazed, in the main rooms. The front door was set in a fussy pretentious porch which spoiled the otherwise simple lines. The front garden was down to lawn and a gravel path went round the integral garage to the back garden. Beyond stretched fields, now almost all arable because in the past the farmers had found too many of their cattle or sheep maimed by shot or even arrows.

  The three men parked the car at the end of the road which led into the close. It was a dark night and the street lighting was poor so that they were unworried by the fear that a chance encounter might lead to one or more of them being observed. They chose number one, Hatton Close, solely because it was the first house they came to. The owner could never have foreseen that the chance which led him to buy that house and not number seven was going to prove so tragic.

  They crossed the front lawn: the leading man carried two plastic containers filled with petrol, the second man two parcels which he was at great pains to keep upright, and the last man a sawn-off shotgun.

  The man with the containers put these down in the porch and took from his coat pocket a number of skeleton keys which looked like double-ended dentist’s picks. The fourth key forced the lock. When he turned the handle, the door opened. They were in luck. The occupants had not bothered to bolt the door as well as to lock it.

  They emptied one container of petrol over the bottom six feet of the stairs, the hall carpet, and the sitting-room. One of the small parcels was turned upside down and left in the corner of the petrol soaked settee. They went through to the kitchen and emptied the second container of petrol in there, making certain all the pine-wood units were well soaked. The second parcel, turned upside down, was placed under the table, with a carpet from the dining area heaped up around it.

  When they left the house they relocked the front door and, as a refinement that was brutal, jammed a thin length of metal into the lock so that it could not readily be opened, even from the inside.

  Four people slept in the house: husband and wife in the large bedroom at the front, daughter next to the bathroom, and son in the back bedroom. They were all sound sleepers.

  The two cork stoppers had been very thin and the first one was pierced by the acid within twenty minutes of the intruders’ leaving, the second one less than a minute later. There was no crashing explosion, despite the petrol fumes, but one second the hall and sitting-room were in darkness, the next they were engulfed in flame: a minute later, the kitchen was the same.

  Glass shattered, wood away from the actual flames caught fire, materials curled up and were skeletonized, a small collection of toy soldiers melted and the martial figures first drooped and then collapsed, like wounded troops, the television tube imploded, wallpaper charred in seconds, rubber hosing and electrical cable disintegrated.

  The mother awoke, instantly aware that something was wrong – twelve years of motherhood had sharpened her instincts – but at first not able to identify what. She heard a roaring, booming sound, puzzled over this . . . And then smelled smoke.

  ‘David,’ she screamed. She switched on the bedside lamp, but it didn’t work because the main cable leading into a meter had already burned through.

  ‘What is it? . . . What’s up?’ he mumbled.

  She ripped back the bedclothes, and reached across for the torch which she always kept by the bed. With this switched on, she could see thick tendrils of smoke curling up from beneath the door. ‘Oh Christ, David! Look!’

  He leapt out of bed, ran to the door, and wrenched this open.

  Flames, softened by the curling smoke, hurled up the staircase which met the landing between the bathroom and back bedroom. The scalding heat made him recoil instinctively and the smoke started a fit of coughing.

  ‘We’ve got to get the children,’ she cried wildly.

  He had never considered himself either a man of decision or a man of much courage, but in the next few minutes he showed sharp decision and high courage. ‘Open the window and get out: use a sheet to climb down.’ She started to shout something, but he ignored her, stepped out into the passage, and slammed the door shut.

  He pressed a handkerchief against his nose. He was terrified, but he went forward towards the appalling heat and the flames.

  He slammed open the door of the nearer bedroom, which was then sufficiently illuminated for him to see that Sandra was still asleep, her face turned towards the door: her hair, which she was now growing long, trailed across one plump cheek. He dragged the bedclothes back and pulled her out of bed and she was still not fully awake when he had her cradled in his arms, although she whimpered with a growing, as yet instinctive, fright. He went through t
he doorway on to the landing. The heat had become fiercer, the flames more threatening, even in the last few seconds. He smelled the acrid scent of singeing hair, little realizing it was his own which burned. Sandra began to scream and wriggle and he had to hold her very tightly against himself as he ran.

  His wife had knotted two sheets together and made one end fast to a bed and she now stood by the opened window. ‘Get her out,’ he panted.

  ‘What about Basil?’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  He went back out of the room to discover that there was now a barrier of fire by the stairs.

  He ran towards the flames, thinking to break through them to the bedroom beyond, but the agony of the heat was too great. Sobbing, he retreated, his exposed skin already feeling painfully taut and the smell of singed hair very much stronger.

  In the bedroom his wife had tied the free end of the sheet around Sandra’s waist and was helping Sandra to climb over the window-sill. He grabbed one of the blankets from the bed and returned to the passage. Draping the blanket over his head and shoulders, he once more tried to force his way through the flames.

  Later, he was to curse himself for not daring those final feet, he was to know the agony of wondering whether he could have made it if he’d forced himself on through the raging hell. But at the time he knew only that it was impossible.

  His wife was shouting out to Sandra to go next door and wake the Calcotts and tell them to call the fire brigade. She turned. ‘Where’s Basil?’

  ‘I can’t get through inside. I’ll have to get into the room from outside – there’s the ladder in the shed.’ He helped her climb out of the window and as he did so the roar of the fire grew. She reached the ground and he went over the sill and scrambled his way down, hitting his hip heavily on a downpipe but knowing nothing about this until later.

  He ran round to the back garden and the toolshed. It was locked because there had been several recent cases of local vandalism and the key was back in the kitchen. Shouting wildly, meaninglessly, he struggled to break in the door, then he picked up a rock and smashed the window.