Daredevil
hoped for a single door which he could have held against them, but a
long passage fronted him as he reached the top. A side door which
was ajar showed a bare room, and he dodged into it, barring the door
behind him, and heard the mob go pounding past. Reloading at speed,
he opened the door again and fired low as the last of them
disappeared through another opening, and two fell to his shooting.
Then Teal and a number of men arrived, and he led them in a rush to
the door and tried the handle. It was locked.
"There may be another bomb coming, so look out!" he warned, and
promptly disregarded his own advice.
The lock burst out under the impact of a bullet, and they charged in.
The place was beautifully empty.
"This is annoying," said Teal with staggering restraint, and walked
to the only window.
Hanging out, he looked to his left and saw that the wall continued
over to the next block, with an archway below at the street level.
He pointed this fact out to Storm, thereby annoying that young man
considerably.
"The place is marked as an island site on the surveyor's plans," he
said. "They must have sent me an old set. You can see the bridge is
newer than either building. I suppose there's a secret panel
somewhere, but we needn't waste time looking for it now. What about
the birds who didn't get away?"
"The boys have got 'em--thirteen. They were unlucky, all right."
"And eighty-odd have slipped the cordon, you long-tailed land-ape!"
snarled Storm with pardonable heat. "Your sense of proportion makes
me want to scream!"
His first thought was for the men under him, but he found that an
ambulance had been sent along by a thoughtful authority, and Red
Cross men were already tending the casualties. Six of the constables
were killed, and a number were more or less seriously wounded. Then
he went along to the room where the thirteen unlucky ones were under
guard awaiting the arrival of a van. Their spirit left nothing to be
desired.
"You might as well let us go, guvnor," said one hefty specimen.
"It'll only mean trouble if you take us to the station."
"Yeh!" agreed Storm ironically. "And the trouble will be right up
under your hats!"
The man looked at him queerly.
"D'you really think you'll get us to the station?" he asked, and
Storm showed his teeth.
"I'll think more than that, for your benefit," he said unpleasantly.
"I think in about two months' time you will all hang by your necks
until you are dead!"
Teal, on a round of inspection, stopped Storm to air a theory. The
detective was taking the set-back with great patience. He stripped
the wrapping from a wafer of chewing-gum and inserted the sweet in
his mouth with care.
"Has it occurred to you," he said, "that even a lot of thugs like
that bunch wouldn't be armed to the teeth, every man of 'em, in the
ordinary way, if they'd thought they were all snug and chummy?"
This was a far-fetched suggestion, Storm opined, but Teal's
confidence was undamped. He went to the telephone in the hall and
called Exchange.
"Central-Inspector Teal," he introduced himself. "Has this number
been called in the last hour? ... Thank you.... Ah! ... public call
box at Monument Station you said? ... Thanks."
"Three bluffs were put over in this shack to-night," Storm murmured
thoughtfully as Teal replaced the receiver. "I don't think it
matters which one that call gave away." He looked at the detective
sombrely. "Teal! This is Hell's own song and dance act! They were
waiting for us, and they guessed they could make a slick enough
getaway when the time came; they just stayed on to liven things up a
bit for us. That's nerve! I wish the swine didn't seem so damned
sure of themselves."
"You surprise me--after that speech of yours at the Enquiry," Teal
said drily.
Shortly afterwards one of the Flying Squad's vans arrived with the
detachment which had guarded the Bank Station. The officers were
unloaded, and the captured members of the Triangle shipped instead,
with two armed men for company. A third armed man rode beside the
driver.
Huge drays with their attendant school of porters were already about,
blocking the narrow street, and the van made slow progress. Storm
watched it go with a frown, for the confident words of one of the
prisoners stuck in his head. A second van arriving at that moment,
he sent it on the trail of the first for additional security, but by
that time there was a thick jam of slow traffic between the two, and
in those circumstances he had some doubts of the efficiency of his
precaution.
"If they do get away, I'll believe I'm dreaming a detective story,"
he told himself.
Nevertheless, the prisoners did escape, and by a ruse so simple that
it was almost certain to succeed.
The leading van made for Headquarters via Tower Hill and Eastcheap,
to avoid the obstructions of Lower Thames Street as much as
possible--a move which the strategist would have foreseen. At the
turn into Tower Street it encountered a lorry laden with men, who to
the casual eye were navvies on their way to work, but who must almost
certainly have been a section of the crowd which had made its getaway
through the secret door in the upper storey of the sawmill. As the
van containing the prisoners took the bend, its escort being still
held up in the wedge of Billingsgate traffic, the lorry seemed to get
out of hand, and swerved across the road. It caught the Flying Squad
van squarely across the bonnet, throwing the whole vehicle round in a
complete circle which fetched up in a smash against a lamp-post. The
driver of the police van and the man who sat beside him were thrown
out and dangerously injured; the two armed men inside, half-stunned
by the shock, were quickly overpowered by the "navvies" who swarmed
from the lorry. The rescue party and their friends then reëntered
the lorry, which in the meantime had been backed out of the wreckage,
and which by reason of its superior weight and the angle of impact
had suffered no great damage, and were driven off. The rescue was
conducted with such well-organised speed that it was obvious that
some such contingency had been feared and prepared for, and the
proceedings rehearsed beforehand. From start to finish the incident
took no longer than three minutes, and the lorry was rushing away
through the deserted streets before any of the few spectators could
recover from their astonishment. The lorry was driven round the
Tower and across Tower Bridge, and later in the day was found
abandoned outside a builder's yard in Bermondsey.
All this, of course, neither Storm nor Inspector Teal heard until
some time afterwards.
"There's two more bits of news for you," Teal said in his homeward
taxi. "One is that Miss Hawthorne's slipped her man and disappeared."
"I knew that," said Storm, although for the first time since the
opening of that brief, hectic battle he remembered Susan's threat to
return. "What else?"
"This." Teal fished in his pocket and brought out a grubby scrap of
paper on which a message was typewritten. "Birdie tried to get this
put in the _Era_ agony column. The clerk smelt rats and phoned us."
Storm read:
Allay contemptible inanity. Groan in it ping, correct, a a a, ping,
a a a. Attaboy consuming, brass band ping, a, loving wine. Cry
alas, glory me, ping. Alone. Weeping, days are long, 2. Try again,
a ping, presumably futility. A ping a ping. It is hope, frustrated,
pong sadly, ping, drying tears. Inside, to see pong ping, a, come
and be blest.
"Has Birdie taken to free verse," he asked mildly, when he had
perused the amazing document a second time, "or are we both mad?"
Teal shook his head.
"Nor is Birdie in love, as far as I can make out," he said.
At the Albany, Storm invited the detective upstairs, for he felt like
anything but endeavouring to put in a few hours' sleep before
commencing the next day's work.
"You may as well wait a bit and have breakfast with me," he said as
they went in. "Has anyone else been getting busy on this little
puzzle?"
"It's a code, of course," said Teal unnecessarily, and Storm stopped
in the hall to wring his hand in mute admiration.
"You're a genius!" he declared brokenly when he had found his voice.
Comfortably ensconced in a deep armchair, with one of Storm's cigars
between his teeth, the somnambulous Mr. Teal became less trite.
"Our tame expert's on the job, but he's nowhere near it yet. Said it
was like nothing in his experience. It's something absolutely new.
I suppose it's simple enough really, but these experts have such
conventionally eccentric minds that the obvious always gets by them."
"Thank God I'm not an expert," said Storm fervently.
He mixed himself a drink, carried the cigarette box over to the
centre table, lighted a smoke, and began to work.
He was silent for a long time, and then he leaned back, staring at
the ceiling. The pencil in his hand drummed against his teeth, began
to beat out a meditative tattoo. The sound interested him,
apparently, to the exclusion of everything else, and then suddenly he
brought his chair back to the vertical and permitted himself a soft
"Jerusalem!" of satisfaction. He wrote swiftly for a few moments,
and then turned to the expectant Teal.
"Who are the H's we know in this case?" he asked.
Teal pondered.
"There's Harry the Toff--I think he's in. And Horring, the hold-up
man--he's reformed lately, which always makes me think of Triangles
these days. Oh, and Hannassay; but Hannassay's dead and buried.
That's all I can remember off-hand."
"I can add one to that list," said Storm, and crossed to the
telephone.
There was a short silence, and then he was speaking into the
instrument.
"Hullo--Terry? What on earth are you up for at this hour? ... Oh, I
see.... Yes, I'll bet there was some vertical breeze! Got home all
right, though? ... Mmm--alone? ... Not even Uncle Joe? ... Lazy
piker! Look here, can I speak to her? Is she up still? ... Right."
He covered the transmitter with his hand while he waited, and
addressed Teal. "This is the H you couldn't remember off-hand," he
remarked. "I want another man to watch her, and I'll have the coats
off their backs if she slips 'em again!"
"Miss Hawthorne?" queried Teal, mildly interested.
"That same.... Hullo. Yes.... Splendid! But listen, Susan, I'm
coming round right after breakfast, and I'm going to get your goat!
... No, but you've got to play the game! Now look here, where did
Joe leave you? ... Tower Hill? ... So you didn't keep your promise?
... Jerusalem--who? ... Damn it.... Oh, all right. S'long!"
He hung up the receiver.
"Saw the getaway and recognised someone," he explained as he came
back. "This code, now. It's Morse. Short and long syllables equal
dots and dashes. But some of the signals are too long to get into
one word, so _ping_ or _a_ equals _dot_, and _pong_ equals _dash_.
When more than one word or letter goes to make up a signal the phrase
is enclosed in commas. Groan in it ping, for instance, is
_dash-dot-dot-dot_. The words are easy. _Allay:
dot-dash--contemptibly: dot-dash-dot-dot_--and so forth. Here's the
whole shoot, in case you can't read Morse."
He tossed over a slip of paper, and Teal read the scribbled words
with interest.
"_All bases. Urgent. Take A. No. 2. Kill H. Urgent. Apex._"
"Clever," was Teal's grudging comment. "What do we do about it,
Chief?"
"Give it back to Birdie and try to kid him you've decided it was
innocent. That'll be a job, but it'll have to be done. If the
orders don't go out through the Era, they'll go out some way else,
and knowing their code 'll be useful if they try it on again. I'm A,
of course, and I'm to be taken. But who is 2--or is it a place?"