Be Kind to the Killer

Book 71: Murder Room

by Henry Wade

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Detective Constable Henry Campion turns lone avenger when his childhood friend and colleague DC Fred Jordan is shot dead by a gangster who is spared the death sentence. And Campion is convinced there were two killers. To try to catch the second, Campion goes undercover as a spiv in a King's Cross nightclub, the Full Moon. But Campion's adventures at the Full Moon draw him deeper into gangland, and closer to the woman of his dreams - his dead friend's widow . . . But is it love, or is Anne Jordan using Campion for her own ends?

Release date: July 28, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 306

Sample

IN THE dock of No. 1 Court of the Central Criminal Court a prisoner stood, awaiting sentence. A blue-clad prison officer was on either side of him, each quietly alert and ready
for any possible move by a man known to be violent and now facing the extreme moment of his ordeal. The prisoner himself, however, showed less sign of tension than anyone else in Court. He was a
man in the early thirties, lightly built but wire-strong, with black hair combed smoothly back from his forehead and a thin line of moustache on his upper lip. His mouth was thin, but his most
striking and repellent feature was a pair of very pale, almost yellow eyes that never seemed to blink and throughout his trial had carried no expression of any sort or kind.

That trial had lasted four days and was now in its closing moments. The very atmosphere of the Court suggested this; in spite of ‘improved’ systems of ventilation, the air was stale
and sickly, and the human beings in the Court seemed to be expelling fœtid air from their oxygen-starved lungs. A look of exhaustion was on every face—except the prisoner’s, on
which no expression, whether of freshness or exhaustion, hope or fear, weakness or pity, had been seen by those who had watched him closely for four days.

And now was the supreme moment. The jury had returned their verdict, the Clerk of the Court had asked his last question and received no answer. Dead silence held the Court, broken only by a
woman’s nervous cough.

The Judge’s Clerk came forward, a square of black cloth in his hand, but the Judge waved him aside. His hands folded in front of him, he looked steadily at the man in the dock. His voice,
when he spoke, was calm and impersonal, but utterly cold.

“Augustus Swaile, you have been found guilty, and rightly found guilty, of the murder of a police officer in the execution of his duty. The sentence that I pass upon you is that prescribed
by law, death by hanging.”

A woman screamed, and cried out:

“But they can’t!”

A general stir and murmur ran through the crowded Court. The prisoner turned at a touch on his arm from the officer beside him, and then those at the back of the Court saw for the first time a
flash come into the cold eyes; the thin lips drew back from his teeth in what might have passed for a smile, and he jerked his thumb in the air with a gesture of insolent contempt. Then he
disappeared down the covered stairs.

Gus Swaile made that gesture because he knew that he was not going to suffer death by hanging. Not many weeks previously a beneficent Parliament had passed the second reading of a Bill which
provided for the suspension of capital punishment for five years; although a Judge would still automatically pass sentence of death in accordance with the law, the Home Secretary had announced that
he would invariably advise His Majesty to commute that sentence to one of imprisonment for life. That meant twenty years and . . .

“If I behave pretty I’ll be out in fifteen,” exclaimed Swaile exultantly, as he waited for the motor Black Maria to take him back to Pentworth. “Fifteen and
thirty-three’s forty-eight; lots of time for a bit of fun, eh, boys?”

The grim-faced prison officers beside him were not amused.

Still less amused was a young police-officer in plain clothes, who stood at the back of the Court, watching the crowd of barristers, witnesses, onlookers disperse. This was Detective-Constable
Henry Campion, the life-long friend of the man whom Swaile had killed, who, ever since giving his evidence, had stood where he was now, listening with tense face to all that passed in that Court,
waiting for the moment when the murderer should be condemned. He had known, of course, that the sentence which followed would be a mockery, but that triumphant gesture of Swaile’s had brought
it home to him with a stab of bitter pain. This man had killed Fred, brutally, without any shadow of excuse, and he ought himself to die. But in fifteen, or at the most twenty years he would be out
in the world again, ready—and likely—to kill another good man.

Henry Campion and Fred Jordan had been born in the same street in Bermondsey, had gone to the same schools, joined the Force together, and by a combination of luck and application had got
themselves in due course posted as Detective-Constables to the same Division (P) of the Metropolitan Police. And now Fred was dead and buried, and his murderer—a guilty, callous murderer if
ever there was one—would live a comfortable, idle life in prison for a few years and then be loosed on the world again to enjoy another spell of vicious, dangerous existence.

Campion’s eyes hardened as these thoughts ran through his brain, while automatically they watched the scene before them. After a time they turned to a bench where two women were
sitting—had sat throughout the trial. One, young, attractive, but white-faced and sad, was Anne Jordan, widow of the murdered man. Beside her sat Mrs. Persse, wife of Detective-Sergeant
Persse, who himself now stood beside his subordinate, fully aware of what was passing through the young fellow’s mind.

“Anne’s stood up to it fine, eh?” he muttered to Campion, but the latter’s attention was no longer on the women. He was watching the other occupants of the bench, now
filing out into the well of the Court.

“Who’s that fellow in the black coat?” he asked in a low voice.

“Dunno. Been there most days, I noticed,” answered Sergeant Persse. “Seems like a solicitor or a doctor or something. Friend of the family, perhaps.”

“Not Anne’s family. She’s never looked nor spoke to him,” said Campion.

The man they were now looking at was middle-aged, with dark, greying hair, clean-shaven, rather puffy as to the cheek and wearing a pair of large horn-rimmed spectacles. He walked with a slight
stoop, and had a dull, expressionless face. His clothes and general appearance would have fitted either of the two professions suggested by Sergeant Persse—or, indeed, that of any other of
the well-to-do, black-coated order. He did not appear to know the people who had sat beside him, and he soon passed out of sight and out of the mind of the two police-officers.

“I’ll get a cab, and the wife’ll take Anne home. Wanted her to come to us, but she’s got an aunt looking after her. Wouldn’t come to Court, though. You wait
outside, and then we’ll walk back and have supper. Jess has laid on a kidney pudding, she tells me.”

“Thank you, Sergeant; but I’ll be getting along to my digs. Think I’ll turn in early. Not been sleeping too well lately.”

“You’ll come back to supper with us, young feller,” said Persse firmly. “Sleep all right when you get a good supper and a pint of wallop inside you. Much better get this
off your chest; I know it’s there. No good chewing it over by yourself.”

For a moment Campion’s mouth showed signs of obstinacy, then it widened into a grin. It was a big mouth, too big for beauty, and normally famous for that grin.

“Thank you, Tom,” he muttered. “Do me good, that will.”

Sergeant Persse moved off to collect his charges, and the young detective watched him with amused affection. Persse was a thin man, with a solemn, almost cadaverous face. To a casual
acquaintance he appeared dreary and dyspeptic, but when among his friends and colleagues there was generally a twinkle in his eye, and there was no more popular officer in the Division, expecially
among the younger men, who could always count on him for a helping hand. Persse was nearing fifty, and should by now have reached a higher grade, but he just lacked the initiative which makes the
Detective-Inspector, and was content to serve his time out in his present rank. His superiors knew him to be utterly reliable, and he fitted perfectly an extemely important niche in his corner of
the C.I.D.

He had taken the two young constables, Jordan and Campion, under his wing when they were posted to P Division, and had taught them a good deal that they had not learnt at Hendon. Gradually he
had assumed the position of ‘father’ to them, and he and Mrs. Persse, being childless, had enjoyed having the two decent young fellows home to supper, whenever tours of duty allowed.
When Jordan married, barely a year before his death, this relationship had naturally faded, but the two women had soon become friends, and when the tragedy occurred Jess Persse had proved how
staunch a one she could be.

Sergeant Persse had himself played the same part with Harry Campion. The two young fellows had been almost like twins, in the closeness of their association and interests. When Jordan fell to
the murderer’s bullet, Campion might well—if he had known it—have sung the lament of David for Jonathan. No wonder, then, that his heart was now bitter at what he regarded as the
sloppy sentimentality that allowed a killer to escape his proper punishment.

The Court was now being prepared for the morrow’s session; clerks were collecting papers, cleaners were at work and, although a little fresh air had drifted in through the open doors, the
general atmosphere was drab and depressing in the extreme. Campion followed the last of the crowd out into the echoing passages and made his way to the entrance hall, where little groups of
people—barristers, pressmen, amateur criminologists—still stood discussing the case. An angry-looking man was elaborating the theme: ‘Better dead’; another wondered how this
farce was going to help stop the crime-wave; whilst Campion heard someone, probably one of the amateurs, say that it would be extremely interesting to see, in fifteen years’ time, what effect
Parliament’s clemency would have had upon Mr. Augustus Swaile.

Campion smiled grimly, and went out into Old Bailey, from which the crowd, which had lingered all day awaiting the verdict, had now dispersed. He wondered whether Sergeant Persse would have been
able to find a taxi for his wife and Mrs. Jordan, whether he ought to have offered to go with them, whether . . . and here was Tom Persse at his side.

“Come along, son. Walk’ll do us good. Get a tram at the Elephant; Underground’ll be jam-packed now.”

“You find a taxi all right, Sergeant?”

Persse chuckled.

“Didn’t have to find one,” he said. “Had one standing by all afternoon since four pip-emma. I knew they’d finish between that and six; no chance of the jury taking
long to reach a verdict in this case.”

“What’s the use of a verdict?” asked Campion bitterly. “They won’t hang the swine, and that’s all that matters.”

The two detectives now had the street to themselves; they were in plain clothes, and there was little risk of an official eye lighting upon them. Detective-Sergeant Persse slipped his arm
through that of Detective-Constable Campion.

“Now look here, young Harry,” he said; “you’ve got to take a pull at yourself, and take it now. I know just what you feel; I feel it myself. These (richly qualified)
politicians have done a damn silly thing, and by now they’re probably sorry for it. But that’s nothing to do with us. Our job was to catch him and put him in that dock; we did that, and
what happens after that is no affair of ours. We have our feelings, granted; but if we let ’em get hold of us we shan’t have another happy minute, and we shan’t do Fred any good,
nor Anne either. You’ll do much more good if you try and help her get over it, and you won’t do that if you’re bitter and angry. Get me?”

Harry Campion gave the older man’s arm a squeeze.

“You’re a wise old beggar, Tom,” he said. Then in a louder voice: “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll bear what you say in mind.”

Quietly they unlinked arms and turned into Ludgate Hill.

“Wonder what these New Zealanders’ll do to us,” said Sergeant Persse.

It was seven o’clock by the time they reached Sergeant Persse’s little house in West Dulwich. Mrs. Persse was already there, busy preparing supper for two men who
needed it—for she had guessed that her husband would bring Harry Campion home with him.

“I tucked Anne up with a hot-water bottle and a nice cup of tea,” she said. “Her auntie’ll look after her all right. Comfortable old body, she is, and not so silly as
some I know.”

Jess Persse was a ‘comfortable body’ herself, without being old. She was, in fact, forty-five, and if ‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat’ his wife clearly could and did. In
appearance, husband and wife could not have been more dissimilar, but they were devoted lovers and friends.

“There’s your slippers warming by the hearth, Tom,” she said, “and, Harry, you’ll find a clean towel next door; just you wash some of the grub of that nasty Court
off your face and hands while I see what I can do about your inside.”

Very soon their insides were being well attended to. Before changing into his slippers, Sergeant Persse had gone round with a jug to the local, and by the time the kidney pudding and the beer
had been disposed of both men were feeling on better terms with the world.

For a while they had managed to keep off the trial and the murder which had preceded it, but with pipes lit they inevitably returned to the subject that held their minds. At first their talk was
fragmentary comment upon the conduct of witnesses, the performance of counsel, the wisdom of the Judge, but they came at last to the vital matter—the man in the dock.

“I’d have known he was guilty, whatever they said,” declared Mrs. Persse. “His eyes were downright bad.”

“Bad they are, but not enough to hang a man on, old girl,” protested her husband. “The evidence was clear enough, though. Never any doubt of a conviction.”

Campion nodded.

“Clear enough. But there was more than one should have been in the dock.”

Sergeant Persse shot a look at his young colleague.

“No proof of that, Harry,” he said.

“I say there was,” replied Campion doggedly. “Fred was hit on the back of the head before he was shot. That means there was a man behind him. If the man was alone and behind
him, why didn’t he just slip quietly off? Why risk the rope?”

“That’s a point, of course,” replied Persse. “But the Yard and us, we looked everywhere for another man, or proof one was there, and we never found it.”

“Well, he was there,” repeated Campion. “I know he was. And I’m going to get him.”

Sergeant Persse stared.

“You are? Come off it, boy. What can you do, when a man like Chief Inspector Vine has failed?”

“Don’t know he has failed. May be still trying, for all I know. But I’m going to, anyway.”

Mrs. Persse saw that it was time for her to intervene. She had her own reasons for wanting to let the matter drop. These men that her husband and these two boys and all the rest of the Force had
been hunting for were killers. One of her friends had been killed already—and a man had been convicted of his murder. That was enough; let it drop. No good saying that to Fred Jordan’s
mates, though; not on those grounds, anyway.

“Oh, what’s the good?” she asked. “Even if you do catch him they won’t hang him.”

Her husband cursed under his breath; that was just the line of thought he had been trying to squash. He saw Harry Campion’s face go white and tense again. The young fellow stared at Mrs.
Persse, opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again and left the words unsaid.

THE EVENTS which led up to the trial and conviction of Swaile were as follows:

Ever since the end of the Second World War there had been a wave of crime in London and the big cities. It was, no doubt, an inevitable reaction; men accustomed to quick death and the use of
violence now found themselves released from the restraints of discipline and unwilling—in many cases—to make a new living by steady, monotonous work. Shortages and the ‘black
market’ encouraged crime, which paid quick and handsome dividends. But the major factor was a simple one—lack of man-power in the police. All forces were far under strength, and nowhere
was this more seriously the case than in the Metropolitan Police. If a highly trained Criminal Investigation Department can detect crime, it is the man on the beat who prevents it. London was
notably short of men on the beat.

Not only was there a huge increase in the number of crimes committed, but the element of violence was constantly present and tending, if anything, to increase. Too many ‘souvenirs’
and stolen arms, too many violent, callous men to use them. Too few police to deter or to catch them.

Central London and the rich residential areas north of the Thames were the happy hunting-grounds for the gangs and the independent operators—the lone wolves who trusted no man but
themselves. There was crime, of course, south of the river, but it was of a comparatively minor character, and up to the end of 1947 Superintendent Redding, in charge of No. 4 District of the
Criminal Investigation Department, was able to congratulate himself that in the matter of crime-waves he was on a par with Pharisees—‘not as other men (his colleagues north of the
river) are’. This District of his was a large one, bounded on the north by the Thames and stretching from Battersea–Mitcham–Sutton in the west to Erith–Bexley–St. Mary
Cray in the east, with a southern boundary including Croydon, Kenley and Farnborough. It did not, of course, contain such rich preserves as Mayfair, Regent’s Park, Hampstead, Chelsea,
Richmond and Wimbledon, but many warm citizens dwelt under Superintendent Redding’s umbrella and, so far, had dwelt in comparative peace and security.

On the morning of 21st January, 1948, Redding received the report of a burglary in Beckenham, which made him sit up and take notice. Apart from one or two interesting features concerned with
method of entry and objects stolen, the fact which deeply concerned Superintendent Redding was that the owner of the house entered, a retired haberdasher named Clinton, had been brutally kicked in
the lower part of the stomach. His story was that he had woken up shortly before midnight to find a masked man in his room. The burglar had told him to get out of bed, asked him if he kept any
money in the house, and on receiving a negative reply had assaulted him in the way described, leaving him unconscious and severely injured.

Nothing of this kind—nothing so gratuitously brutal—had occurred in Redding’s District before, and it was exactly what had been happening in Golders Green and Kensington.

“Switching this way, are they?” thought Redding. “Been getting a bit over-confident north of the river, and one or two have run into trouble. So they’re looking for a
soft spot. Well, they damn well won’t find it in my District.”

His immediate action was to send for his Divisional Detective-Inspectors, one from each of the six Divisions in his District. He was a believer in the spoken rather than the written word, and
his conferences were frequent, and by some regarded as too frequent and a nuisance. Not so this one. As soon as his subordinates were seated and had, at his invitation, lighted pipes or cigarettes,
Redding came straight to the point.

“There was a burglary with violence in Beckenham last night,” he said. “Your Division, Hastie, and of course you know all about it and want to get back on the job. I
shan’t keep you long. Point is this. The violence was of the brutal, unnecessary type that’s been happening up north. Our local burglars, as you know, don’t go in for rough stuff
much—too damn careful of their own skins. But these gangs, and tough guys from 1 and 2 Districts, like to leave their mark behind, especially on a woman or an old man. That’s what
happened in Beckenham, and my guess is that they’re switching south of the river, thinking we shan’t know how to deal with them.”

Superintendent Redding stopped to re-light his own pipe. There was no sign of boredom among his listeners at this conference.

“That’s where they’ll make their mistake. We’ll carry the fight to them. We won’t wait till they’ve done their dirty stuff; we’ll go out to meet them,
catch them at it and hit them for six.”

Consciously or unconsciously, Superintendent Redding modelled his conferences on those of the commander of a famous army.

“You mean use the rough stuff ourselves, Super?” asked D/D/I Boughton eagerly.

Redding took a pull at himself.

“Nothing of the kind,” he said sharply. “I mean figuratively, not literally. If we are ready for them we’ll make it so hot that we’ll clear them right out of the
District before they can get a foothold. If they find that crime south of the river don’t pay, they won’t come here.”

“Too right,” muttered D/D/I/ Jelly disrespectfully.

“Now, what I want you all to do,” continued Redding, “is to get down to your street maps, mark the districts most likely to attract these gentry, and see that they’re
well patrolled. I suggest you ask your Superintendents to let their uniformed men work in with your detectives. I’ll go over to the Yard and see if I can get the A.C.C. to speak to the
Commissioner about getting the uniformed branch to co-operate fully with us. Of course, I’ll visit your Divisional Superintendents myself as soon as I have time and see what I can do to get
good liaison. Any questions?”

“Any chance of reinforcements, sir?” asked D/D/I Hastie. “It’s not easy to cover forty square miles with forty detectives. They’ve got their ordinary work to do,
and they must get a sleep sometimes.”

“Not a hope, I should say,” replied Superintendent Redding brusquely. “The whole Force is under strength, and north of the river they’re in the thick of it. We
can’t send up an S.O.S. when the first shell falls on our line. No more questions? Right, dismiss. Stay a moment, Hastie, and tell me the latest about this Clinton case.”

Divisional-Detective-Inspector Hastie was a busy man in the days that followed. His was the largest Divisional area in the District, and it was in that area that ‘the
first shell’, as his chief had described it, had fallen. Not only had he to investigate that brutal crime, but he had to work out his plans for meeting any development in the criminal
assault, on the lines that Superintendent Redding had laid down.

As soon as he had time to spare from his Beckenham case he called together as many of his detective-inspectors, detective-sergeants and detective-constables as he could get hold of, and held his
own conference. He was lucky in that the uniformed Superintendent in charge of the Division, Superintendent Bellingham, was entirely free of the jealousy which sometimes marred the association of
the uniformed and plain clothes branches. The one thing that mattered to him was that his Division should be kept clear of serious crime, and he gladly co-operated with Hastie in drawing up his
offensive-defensive plan.

This plan was really no more than a revision and tightening-up of the normal ‘point’ plan of the uniformed police with, superimposed upon it, a system of special reconnaissances by
the plain-clothes detectives attached to the Division.

Among the latter were two young detective-constables, Jordan and Campion, who seized with great enthusiasm this opportunity for distinguishing themselves. They got D/D/I Hastie’s approval
of their own idea of working as a pair, even if it meant that one of them sometimes worked when he should have been off duty. Their plan was to work parallel streets in the better-class residential
areas, their idea being that a house-breaker disturbed by one of them would be liable to make off through the back garden, over the wall into the garden of the house in the next street—where
he might run into the arms of the other detective. They allowed themselves two minutes for each house and garden, so that they would be working more or less together up their respective streets,
even though invisible to one another. They wo. . .