They Never Looked Inside Read Online Free PDF Page B

caught one of them. We got him red-handed, a few hours after the burglary, with half the stuff on him. I think you know him. His name is Andrews – John Patrick Andrews, known to his friends as ‘Gunner’. He was in your Company, I understand.”
    To say that McCann was surprised would be an understatement.
    “Andrews! We certainly had an Andrews. He came to us from one of the Artillery Regiments, and now that you mention it, I believe he was called ‘Gunner’ by his friends. But he was a decent lad—it’s difficult to think of him as a criminal.”
    “I thought that he seemed a reasonable type of man,” agreed Hazlerigg. “For instance, he carried no weapon of any sort. Not even a stick. And he was certainly a fighter. When we took him in an all-night cafe he broke two chairs and a table on my men before they could get him down. We don’t mind that sort of thing, you know. It makes the men feel they’re earning their pay.”
    “But Andrews, a crook,” said McCann. “I’d have gone bail that he was straight. Look here, Inspector, I suppose you’re absolutely certain . . .”
    “Red-handed – he hasn’t even bothered to deny it.”
    “One thing, if he is a criminal, and I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it, he hasn’t lost any time, has he?”
    Hazlerigg made an indeterminate noise which McCann interpreted as agreement.
    “I mean to say—he’s only been demobbed about three months. Possibly less. And I shouldn’t have said that he was naturally that way inclined. He didn’t come from the gutter.”
    The Inspector said: “I’ve asked you down here to help us, and if you’re going to help us it’s only fair that you should know something of what this is all about. I can’t fill in the details myself, but I can give you an outline. I need hardly tell you that this is confidential. Top secret, I believe that’s the correct term. Very well then—”
    Hazlerigg talked easily and well. And as he talked Major McCann had the impression that a light was going up in a quarter of which he had hitherto known very little. He had the ordinary newspaper reader’s knowledge of the great daily battle between organised wrong and organised right. And it began to dawn on him that he had known as little about it, really, as the man in the street had known about the realities of this war.
    Less.
    For in war there is a certain morale-building value in the work of a good war correspondent which has led to the toleration of accurate front-line reporting. Whilst in the war against crime, the veil is only rarely and briefly lifted.
    The results are shown all right with all the intermediate steps left out.
    “The police are seeking a Mr. Albert Brown of Putney for questioning in connection with the recent demise of Mr. Sidney White: Mr. White, it will be remembered, was found early yesterday morning with serious head wounds . . .”
    “Before the war,” Hazlerigg said, “it wasn’t so bad. In modern jargon, we had ‘parity of forces’. But just at this moment I can’t disguise from you things aren’t so good. Some of the reasons are temporary ones – we had them after the last war – like the shortage of trained men, illegal firearms, the presence of foreign deserters, and so on. Time will cure them quickly enough, I’ve no doubt. But there’s something else, too.”
    His heavy, Cromwellian face looked so serious that McCann was genuinely startled.
    “We’re up against something altogether new in crime – new, that is, so far as this country is concerned. It is something like what the Americans call a ‘racket’ – but a racket with some odd strings in it. Here’s what’s happened so far. Early this spring we started getting a large number of house breakings and shop burglaries, all carrying the same trademark. I don’t mean that the guilty party signed his name in chalk on the safe door, or any boy-scoutery of that sort. But there were signs, enough in the end to add up to a certainty