Hopscotch

“Now then,” Cutter continued, “we’ll want special emphasis on the surveillance of rental lockers. We know Kendig didn’t have his manuscript when he was arrested last night. It wasn’t in his hotel room. It’s hidden somewhere, and in due course he’s going to have to collect it.”

Gle

Cutter’s teeth formed an accidental smile; the interruption—and Follett—a

“Well I may be on the wrong track.” Follett rocked his hand, fingers splayed. “But it kind of seems to me his whole modus operandi involves harassing us. He’s thumbing his nose, toying with us, right? He sends notes and postcards to people, he makes fu

“You haven’t. But I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

But Ross saw it, just a split second before Follett spoke; and he was begi

Follett put on a broad smile but his eyes lay unblinking against Cutter. He flapped his hands. “Well Joe let’s just assume we don’t nail him to some railroad locker. Let’s assume he hid his manuscript where we won’t find it. Seems to me he’s going to drop another chapter in the mail sooner or later. Now as long as we’re spending half the national debt and committing all this manpower to the job anyway, my little suggestion would be this: Let’s put surveillance on the Goddamned post offices.”

– 22 –

HE’D BEEN LOOKING for a parked car to steal when an Evening Standard van had stopped for the light at the corner; its bed had been empty, evidently it was returning to the printery from its last delivery, and he’d hopped up into the dark open back just as it started moving so that the driver wouldn’t notice the shift of weight.

When it slowed to make its turn into Fleet Street he’d jumped off and walked along the Embankment into the tangle of busy activity in the Black-friars area—the wholesale lorries banging in and out of warehouses. It was no great trick to hop onto a slow-moving staked produce truck; the driver never knew he was there.

Somewhere along the Archway Road, not quite sure of his bearings, he dropped off the truck and made his way afoot off the lighted thoroughfare into a dreary lane of grim Victorian brick—identical attached row houses of Dickensian bleakness. Cars were jammed together along both curbs but it wasn’t transport he needed just now.

He went the length of the lane—two hundred yards, not much more. It ended against a parapet; a steep slope fed down into a railway cut. He saw no signal lights along the tracks; perhaps it was an abandoned line. Garden allotments were terraced into the slope, each with its little padlocked tool shed, a few with greenhouses.

He’d worn no topcoat because he hadn’t wanted the clumsiness of flapping skirts in his burglary; he was chilled to the bone in shirt and jacket but what mattered was that they knew the clothes he was wearing and they knew he had no money to buy different garb. He couldn’t very well go back to his hotel for a change of clothes; they’d have that sealed off first thing because one or another of them was bound to be inspired by that plastic calendar with the hotel’s advertisement on it.

He got up on the stone retaining wall and made his way around behind the row of houses. The back gardens had their degrees of individuality and some of them were fenced but none of the fences was too high to scale. He began to explore.

Each house appeared to have been subdivided into flats, one apartment to each floor; the three ground-floor windows at the rear of a house represented kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Toward the front he surmised there’d be a sitting room and a stair hall. They weren’t tenements but neither were they upper-middle-class digs; these were workingmen’s flats.

The windows were of two kinds: casements on the baths and kitchens, old-fashioned bay windows on the bedrooms. These were vertically hinged-in panels and could be held open at specific apertures by ratchet-holed interior levers that lay at angles across metal pins on the sills. The Englishman was a creature who had a mystical faith in the curative powers of fresh air irrespective of chill, humidity or pollution. Nearly every bedroom window in the row was open at least one notch.

He judged it near three in the morning; they were as sound asleep as they’d ever be. He went along the row exploring. It was only a matter of reaching the fingertips inside, lifting each lever off its pin and swinging the window gently wider; then quietly press a curtain aside far enough to see inside.

They weren’t people of uniform habits. Some were married, some slept alone; some were pin-neat and must have hung their clothes in the cupboards while others had left jackets and trousers strewn across chairs or dressing tables. One flat was postered with psychedelic colors and ban-the-bomb slogans and the bed seemed to be occupied by at least three people. It was the only iconoclast; the other bedrooms he investigated were sedate.

He retraced his way to the stone wall, climbed over and went carefully down the allotment paths. He broke into a splintered tool shed and picked the longest-handled tool he could find, a garden rake, and worked the rake head off the handle. It gave him a pole the length of a short fishing rod. He scrounged in the bins, found an old nail that would do and banged the nail at a right angle into one end of the pole, using the head of the rake for a hammer. He was thinking: if they’d found the manuscript he’d cached in the hotel basement than he’d have to grant them the victory and call off the game. The carbon copy was still safe in Florida but it would stay there untouched; he’d hidden it there for use only in the event some blind accident should destroy the original. But if Cutter’s minions found it in the soap carton that wouldn’t be blind accident; he’d have to concede Cutter the game.

But he didn’t think they’d look for it there. They’d be more clever than that. They’d stake out terminal lockers and they might canvass the banks to find out if a man answering Kendig’s description had rented a safe-deposit box. Probably it wouldn’t occur to them to search the rest of the hotel if they didn’t find the script in his room. And even if they did think of it they’d have to make it no more than a cursory search and the odds against their looking in that particular carton among many were pretty good.

He carried the hooked rod back up to the wall, went over it and started to work through the bedroom window of the second house. He used the pole to reach in through the narrow window, hook the trousers off the chair and pull them out through the window. He did it with a great deal of stealth. The pockets were empty. He hung the trousers back on the hook and pushed them back inside onto the chair. The configuration wasn’t the same as it had been but the man would never notice the difference and even if he did he’d be no more than mildly puzzled; nothing had been removed from him.

The third window was useless; he passed it up. The fourth yielded the first prize of the night: a tweed jacket with a wallet in the inside pocket. There were sixteen pounds in five- and one-pound notes. He took ten pounds, left six, and returned the jacket to the bedroom, hanging it carefully over the back of the chair as it had been before. Then he closed the window back to its original aperture. The man would have to conclude he’d miscounted the contents of his wallet.