Blood and Judgement

Blood and Judgement Read Free

Book: Blood and Judgement Read Free
Author: Michael Gilbert
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midsummer and Micky tried to stick me up for a subscription. I said, surely it isn’t November yet, and Micky said ‘Garn, Sarge, this isn’t Guy Fawkes, it’s Father Christmas.’”
    Gwilliam grunted. He did not share Petrella’s enthusiasm for the Harrington family. They walked the rest of the way to Crown Road in silence, went in under the archway, crossed the courtyard where the police wagons stood, climbed an outside iron staircase, and went through a door which badly needed a coat of paint.
    On the left was the room which served Superintendent Haxtell as an office. Considering that the superintendent was responsible for all criminal investigation in a division which stretched from its southern point just above King’s Cross clear up into open country between St Albans and Cheshunt and contained more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, it might seem odd that he had been provided with a room rather smaller than that occupied by a clerical civil servant of the third grade and furnished in a manner which would have brought a protest from the most junior subeditor in Fleet Street. However, the superintendent was quite used to it. Under normal conditions he spent as little time as possible in his office.
    Conditions were not normal at the moment, owing to the discovery, a week before, in an empty shed under the railway arches at Pond End, of the misused body of nine-year-old Corinne Hart. Until Corinne’s killer was discovered the superintendent was tied fast to his telephone, and the tiny room was further overcrowded by the addition of a camp bed in one corner.
    The room opposite was officially known as the Interview Room. Very few interviews took place in it, because most of the floor space was already occupied by filing cabinets and the rest by Detective Constable Mote’s photographic apparatus.
    The far end of the corridor led straight into the CID room. This looked like nothing so much as a senior classroom. It had six flat desks, each with its chair. (Normally there were only five, but the Corinne Hart inquiry had brought back Sergeant Gwilliam, temporarily, from No. 2 Station and an extra desk had to be squeezed in for him.) Petrella, as sergeant-in-charge, had the biggest desk by the window. Immediately under his eyes sat Probationary Detective Constable Wilmot. Next to him the photographic Mote. In the far corner, Detective Constable Cobley, a Devonian, known naturally as Tom. And under the second window the newly promoted Sergeant Wynne, who was by a long way the oldest man in the room but who had done all his earlier service in the colonial police and was now starting again.
    There were two telephones, located on the window sill for want of anywhere better to put them, and the walls were covered with notices: sociable notices about forthcoming Christmas dances, gloomy notices about the habits of the Colorado beetle, and sharp notices starting “It has been observed that junior detective constables…” and signed “G Barstow, Detective Chief Superintendent i/c No. 2 District Metropolitan Police.”
    When Petrella and Gwilliam came in, this room was empty.
    “Are you going to do anything about Howton?” said Gwilliam.
    “I don’t think so,” said Petrella. “You know what they always say. ‘He wasn’t in uniform. I didn’t know who he was. I thought he was going to hit me, so I hit him first.’”
    Gwilliam grunted. “That landlord,” he said. “It’s in my mind that I had trouble with him before, when I was at this station. If I was you I’d tell the man on that beat to keep his eyes open. You run him in once or twice for serving drink after hours, it’ll teach him to mind his manners.”
    “Howton’s not our headache,” said Petrella. “He belongs to S Division.”
    “I ran Howton in twice when I was in S,” said Gwilliam. “He’s a hard case. He and Monk Ritchie started the first Camden Town mob. Did you know? When Monk was sent up for a handful last year, Howton took over,

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