Dishonour Among Thieves Read online

  “Aye, I’ll try along those lines, and the sooner the better. News travels, as you know. Now look here, Super: you’ll come in on this with us? The sooner we fix things up with the Commissioner’s Office, the better.”

  “Right, settle things your end, there won’t be any difficulty at C.O. There will be a number of lines to follow up and you’re a bit short of men with experience of lengthy interrogations.”

  “Aye, you’re right there; my fellows are reliable enough and observant of matters within their own experience, but they’re on the dumb side, not used to thinking out questions in words.”

  “One thing they’ll be good at, picking up any rumours that have been flying around. If Sam Borwick has been seen in these parts, I believe your sergeant and young Hayton will get to hear of it. For myself, once you’ve got the formalities settled, I’d like to go and have a crack with the Leverstone men and try to pin down these stories about Sam Borwick having been run in. Incidently, do you know the date Mr. Staple was in Leverstone, when he said he saw Sam being run in?”

  “No, I don’t know the date, but you could go and see Staple yourself without waiting for the formalities. He knows you, and he’ll talk to you as soon as anybody.”

  “Right. I’ll go along there this evening. He’s still at Garthmere, isn’t he?”

  “Aye, but he’s not farming now, he’s getting on, seventy-five he’d be. He’s got a cottage below his old steading and a few acres where he grazes some beasts to keep him happy.”

  “And there’s another job,” said Macdonald. “One of us will have to go up and see the manager at the pipe-line works. There’s quite a chance that deceased was one of the gangers who found his own way over here, or came over here to lend Sam a hand, if Mr. Brough’s notion was anywhere near right. If they planned to get any of the furniture out of High Garth, it’d have taken two men to shift it. It’s all heavy stuff.”

  “True enough,” said Bord. “Now would you like to tackle that end, the gangers up on Bowland?”

  “No use trying it by myself, because I’ve never seen Sam Borwick,” replied Macdonald. “We want a photograph of him, or lacking that a description by somebody who knows Sam well: Mr. Staple might be willing to come. Now about deceased: there’s one way we might get him identified—if he’s ever been ‘inside.’ ”

  “Fingerprints?” said Bord, and his voice sounded sceptical. “What are the chances? I never saw a corpse so far gone.”

  “True, but it happens that the skin of the finger tips has remarkable endurance—it’s tough and it retains its characteristic markings even after identification by the usual methods is impossible. The experts who do the P.M. will provide us with fingerprints, sufficient to identify him if his dabs are in records.”

  “Well, I might not have thought of that one,” said Bord.

  A few minutes later they parted, Bord on his way to see Mrs. Borwick, Macdonald on his way to see Mr. Staple.

  3

  While Macdonald and Bord were debating their case, a lorry was grinding up the steep hill from Kirkham to the pipe-line encampment on Bowland Fell. The lorry belonged to the contractors who were laying the pipe line and it carried supplies for the works canteen. The supplies came from Preston and the route followed by the lorry driver on the final stages of his journey was the road through the Lune Valley via Crossghyll and Kirkham and then up the steep hill road on to the heights of Bowland, the only possible approach to the encampment for a wheeled vehicle. Tractors could climb the rough fell tracks which approached the encampment more directly, but the supply lorries always kept to the metalled road. Turner, the driver, followed the same roads every week and had made many acquaintances en route. When he saw the mortuary van turn on to the valley road, it was only natural that he stopped to inquire where it had come from, and only natural that he was told a long and involved story by the roadman who was his informant, a story about a police search up at the uninhabited farmstead, the finding of a body, and about an accident to or an attack on Mr. Brough, who had just been taken to hospital, “mortal bad.”

  When Turner reached the huts where the pipe-line gangers slept and ate, four men came forward as usual to do the unloading and to carry the crates into the storeroom at the back of the canteen: in addition to the four who did the unloading and carrying, there was the canteen manager, Mr. Stone, to check the goods and sign for them. Once again Turner told his news, and made the most of it. A corpse found at High Garth, after a search which had been carried out by the county police and the London C.I.D., a search directed by a local farmer, who had himself been attacked and taken away in an ambulance. The four men who did the unloading, Green, Hall, Walton, and Brook, were reliable fellows, who had worked for the contractors for a period of years. Stone, the canteen manager, knew by experience that it was essential to have trustworthy men on this job. It was all too easy for goods to disappear—a carton of cigarettes, a crate of tinned food—so Stone saw to it that he always had the same men on this particular job and that none of the other gangers hung around while the goods were being moved. He liked to get the job done quickly and the goods put away in the canteen strong room. As he sometimes said to the manager, “They’re not a bad lot of chaps, taking them all round: very much the same set of toughs you found in any infantry regiment And was there any thieving in the army if canteen goods weren’t properly supervised? Ask any old soldier.”

  Today, it was difficult to get through the job with the usual dispatch. The men wanted to hear details of the driver’s story. Where was the body found? How had the farmer been attacked?

  “High Garth?” asked Bill Walton. “That’s the godforsaken old shack perched up on the moor away over there, isn’t it?”

  “There’s two farms, fairly close together, neither of them lived in, and I don’t wonder at it,” put in Percy Hall. “Miles from anywhere. I walked over there last autumn, when the heather was out. With Fuller I went, he said there was a short cut down to a village where there was a pub. Short cut, blimey: miles we walked and never saw no village, just them two farmhouses, empty both of them.”

  “There’s two farmhouses all right, High Garth and Fellcock,” said Turner, “but only one is uninhabited, that’s High Garth, where the body was found. Fellcock’s lived in and the land’s cultivated. You can see that right across the river, green fields and decent buildings.”

  “That’s right,” put in Brook. “Who was it went over there, not long ago? Tom Martin, said there was a decent young couple living there, gave him tea and treated him kind, asked him inside.”

  “Look here, chaps, get a move on,” said Stone. “We shall be having all the lads coming in before long, and I don’t want this lot of stuff lying about. If there’s a story, you can read it in the papers—come on, get moving.”

  Just after the job was finished: Turner had moved his lorry off, Brook called across to one of his mates who had just come off the afternoon shift.

  “Hi, there, Tom! Didn’t you say you’d walked over the moor past them two farmhouses below the ridge, there?” Tom Martin was a fellow in his thirties who moved with an easy swing; he was dark-haired and dark-skinned, with unexpectedly blue eyes which seemed to shine in his soil-grimed face. The black moorland soil made most of the gangers look like chimney sweeps when they came off the shift, and Tom Martin looked filthy enough to be taken for a down and out.

  “Sure I walked over there and down to the village in the valley to that pub you blokes talked about. I brought you back some fags and a drink, you should know.”

  “I do and all. I won’t forget that, mate. I was broke, but I’ll pay you back one day, never forget a good turn. Well, Turner, the lorry driver, says the cops have been out to that farmhouse that isn’t lived in, and they’ve found a stiff there, and a farmer bloke got laid out while the busies were on the job.”

  “Cripes, what a yarn,” said Martin, and Brook went on: “See here, mate. Seeing there’s been trouble over there, as you might say, p’r’aps it’d be be
tter not to know anything about them farmhouses. I’ll bet you any money the cops’ll come up here to badger us poor ruddy gangers. Now see here, if you want a mate to say where you was and where you wasn’t any time they get awkward about—well, count me in. One good turn deserves another.”

  “O.K., mate, that goes by me, too. Always stick by a pal. Cheeri-bye. I’ll clock in for a cuppa. See you later.”

  Chapter Six

  “I DON’T LIKE it, Stone, and that’s a fact,” said John Wharton. Wharton was the manager for the contractors, Barrow & Teesdale, who were taking the pipe line over Bowland to connect the reservoirs they had built there with the water supply of the great industrial city of Leverstone. Wharton was a very able man; he had been in charge of similar projects, in conditions even more remote and inaccessible than Bowland, in the Highlands, in the Welsh mountains and the Northumbrian hills, and he had been heard to say that there was no problem connected with labour gangs in difficult terrain that he hadn’t had to face at one time or another.

  Stone had come to his boss to report the van driver’s story, for Stone, also, was an experienced man, and he knew that crimes which occurred in the vicinity of labour gangs such as theirs were apt to have awkward repercussions.

  “We have trouble enough keeping the chaps on the job up here without having a police inquiry to unsettle them,” went on Wharton, “and that’s what it’ll be, you mark my words. You remember it was the same in Wales. There were two crimes of violence within ten miles of us when we were working on the Trenant dam and the police made a beeline for our headquarters.”

  “You can’t blame the police,” said Stone. “We get a few proper toughs in these gangs. If we were too choosey over the chaps we enroll, the gangs would be below strength and ourselves behind with our contract, and it’s a tough job working out in these wilds.”

  “You’re telling me,” replied Wharton. “Folks say, look at the mechanical aids you have these days, the bulldozers and all the rest. Old Monty gave the answer to that one when he said the army needed men and would always need men no matter how mechanical the unit, for every machine needs a man to tend it.”

  “Aye, that’s sense, that is,” replied Stone, “and if we have the police fossicking around here, the first chaps to walk out on us will be the skilled mechanics: they can get softer jobs than this and they know it.”

  “That applies to every ganger we’ve got, Bill,” rejoined Wharton. “When I first managed a labour camp, way back in the thirties, the men had some inducement to stay on the job, because the alternatives were unemployment and an empty belly. When there are a million and more unemployed in the country, it’s a wonderful incentive to hold on to a job when you’ve got one, because you know you’ll likely not get another. It’s different today: any unskilled able-bodied man can take his choice of jobs, there are more jobs than men; our chaps know it, there’s work on building sites, work on road foundations, work on this, that and the other, and although we pay them well and feed them well, they’d rather have jobs where they can get to a pub in the evening and sleep with their wives at night.”

  Stone chuckled. “Too true, boss. We’ve done pretty well up here; we’ve kept the nucleus of our gangs, the old toughs who’ve been with the company for years and who realise that there’s a lot to be said for a job which provides decent living conditions on the spot, decent food, and a tidy pay packet saved up with a bonus when the job’s finished to time.”

  “That’s it,” said Wharton, “but once we get the police up here, some of the chaps will pack up on us.

  “It happened at Trenant, it’ll happen here.” He paused for a moment and then went on: “It might be a good idea if I had a word with Lawley: he knows more about the chaps than any of us.”

  Lawley was the head overseer, a man who had been with the company before the war, and had rejoined the contractors when he was demobilised after the war.

  “Now let’s hear this story of Turner’s again,” went on Wharton, and Stone replied:

  “The police went up from the valley to one of those derelict farmhouses just over the ridge to the north, and they found a dead man in one of them.”

  “There are two farmhouses over there, but only one of them is uninhabited,” said Wharton. “I hiked over there one day to consider the chances of levelling a track to join up with the road down to the nearest village, Crossghyll, isn’t it? The more easterly of the two farmhouses, High Garth, hasn’t been lived in for years; it does look derelict, a grim stone house set on the moor, without any sort of road or track. The other farm, Fellcock, changed hands last Michaelmas. A chap named Macdonald bought it and he put a young couple into the house: the man, Shearling, cultivates the land and tends the stock and his wife helps him. Fellcock’s a well-cared-for ‘steading,’ as they say in these parts. I had a word with the boss, Mr. Macdonald: he doesn’t live there, but comes up occasionally to keep an eye on things, meaning to live there one day, when he retires. A very nice chap, I thought, though he had no opinion of my idea of a track: didn’t want our gangers coming on his land.”

  “Then it would have been High Garth where the body was found, the uninhabited place,” said Stone. “Turner mentioned a Macdonald, but I thought he said the chap was a policeman, not a farmer.”

  “It’s a common enough name,” said Wharton. “Now what about the farmer who was attacked, that happened this afternoon, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, so Turner said.”

  “Well, maybe we can do a spot of detection on our own,” said Wharton. “I’ll talk to Lawley. I have an idea he’ll have had his eyes open this afternoon. They were doing a bit of blasting, clearing some rock, and I happen to know that Lawley watches out when they’re using explosives, keeps his gangs in regular files while they’re standing by, so that there’s no chance of accidents.”

  Stone chuckled: “And no chance of larceny either,” he added. “We’ve had some characters who’d make off with detonators and suchlike if they had the chance.”

  Wharton nodded. “I know. Well, send Lawley along here. The sooner I get this sorted out the better.”

  2

  Bob Lawley, a tough grizzled man approaching fifty, was a first-rate overseer, who made it his job to know the men he supervised and was in the main trusted by them. Wharton knew that it was Lawley’s ability in dealing with the gangs which was largely responsible for the success of the present operation.

  “Hallo, Bob,” said Wharton, “have you heard this story which Turner’s been spreading round?”

  “I heard it, boss, and I reckon I thought the same thing as you did. We shall be having the police round and the chaps will resent it. Evan Thomas has been spouting hot air already, you’ll remember Thomas was with us when the police were on the job at Trenant. ‘Always the bloody working man they makes for,’ you know the form.”

  “I know it,” agreed Wharton and Lawley went on: ‘There’s two parts to this story of Turner’s, boss: a dead man in an empty farmhouse, a house that’s all bolted and barred, that’s one part: the second is an attack on a farmer close by the house this afternoon. Well, we’re in luck over part two. It happens that Andy Wright and I know where all our chaps were this afternoon.”

  “I hoped you’d say that, Bob. I heard your charges going off.”

  “That’s it. We blasted out that rock which lay across our line. Now I’ve seen a lot of jobs like this, when explosive was used, and I’ve learnt the snags. First you’ve got to keep your eyes skinned to see that none of the chaps get away with detonators or gelignite. We had some of that in Scotland, as you’ll remember. Then you’ve got to see the silly mugs don’t go spreading out, getting too near the charge when it’s being fired. We had forty-eight men out—all four gangs—this afternoon. I supervised the shot-firing party, all men we know. Andy Wright had two gangs of a dozen each, ready to shift the rock we broke up, and Jim Bolt had a dozen maintenance men, checking the engines and drills and other gear. And we can swear to it that the men in every sect
ion were all present and correct.”

  “That’s fine,” said Wharton. “Now let’s have a word about the men themselves. If the police come up here, they’re sure to ask you.”

  “They’re welcome. Most of the chaps have been on the company’s books since Trenant, and we’ve never had any trouble with them. Stone says he has to look out for pilfering, when he’s shifting canteen stores, but that can happen anywhere. I’d say the light-fingered blokes are among that dozen who signed on after the Pembridge harbour works finished their contract I wouldn’t put it past any of them to pinch what he thought he could get away with, but there’s this: not a single bloke of that lot would walk a mile on a decent metalled road if he could help it; as for walking five or six miles over these mucking moors, I just don’t believe it.”

  “Well, we’ve got their records,” said Wharton. “We know they worked on the Pembridge job and there was no trouble there. Now what about the odd lot you had to take on when we got Asian ’flu up here?”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking about them. They signed on for a month, a dozen of them. Six are still here, good steady workers, too. Four of them went at the end of the month and I was glad to see them go—grousers, always complaining and making other chaps discontented. Then there were two Irishmen: they left before their month.”

  “I seem to remember you had trouble with them, fighting or some such.”

  Lawley nodded. “Reilley and Flanagan. Reilley wasn’t a bad chap: he was a worker, he was. Flanagan was born lazy and I reckon he was a liar, too. Reilley was bothering about his wife and family in Ireland: you remember I came to you about him. He hadn’t worked his full month and his agreement said his full wages weren’t due until he’d served his month. I asked if you’d forego that clause and pay him so that he’d enough money for his fare to Belfast.”