The super was out when they arrived back at headquarters — rather to Gently’s disappointment, because he would like to have bounced some of his findings on that sceptical man’s desk. But the super was out: he had received a hot tip about his forgery scare, said the desk sergeant, and had departed with Bryce and two uniform men at a high rate of knots.
‘He’s got a warped sense of value,’ pouted Gently to Copping. ‘In some places it’s homicide that gets top rating…’
‘You’re forgetting he handed that baby on to you,’ grinned Copping, ‘he’s got an alibi now.’
‘I still think a little bit of audience reaction is called for.’
They went into the canteen, where Copping did the honours. It was rather a dull place. The walls were distempered in a dingy neutral tint, the inadequate windows both at one end, the paint worn on lino-top tables and the bentwood chairs looking as though they had been rescued from a jumble sale.
‘They’ve talked about refitting it for years,’ Copping apologized, ‘but somehow the finance committee never quite gets round to it… the food’s all right, though. We made a stink about that a couple of months back.’
Gently examined a plate of sausages and beans apathetically. ‘You have to make a stink at intervals if you want to keep them up to scratch…’
‘Yes, but you should have seen what it was like before then!’
Gently shrugged and embarked on his sausages.
‘We get in touch with the US authorities now?’ inquired Copping, after a silence broken only by the incidental noises made by ingesting policemen.
‘Nmp.’ Gently pursued an errant bean round the rim of his plate.
‘The military’s got good records… they could tell us straight away.’
‘Never mind. Some other time.’
‘They’d know in town…’
‘I know, but never mind.’ Gently swallowed the tail-end of a sausage and grounded his knife and fork. ‘Your print king,’ he said, running his tongue round his lips, ‘what’s his name?’
‘Dack’s your man. Sergeant.’
‘He’s reliable… really?’
‘You trained him, so he’d better be.’
Gently nodded and added a mouthful of strong tea to the sausages. ‘Get him on the job. I can’t spare Dutt just now. See that he does everything that might give something… inside drawers as well as out… and then in the yard, at the back of that down-pipe… he’ll probably have to dismantle it. Don’t wait for me. If you get results, rush some copies to town and check your own files.’
A smile spread over Copping’s heavy features. ‘What about Mrs W’s new lodger?’
‘Nothing about Mrs W’s new lodger… he can sleep under the pier for all I care. When you’ve finished in there, seal it up and leave a uniform man in charge.’
‘I don’t pity the poor swine…! Where can I get you?’
‘Oh… I’ll look in later, or maybe ring.’
‘You’ve got something else?’
‘Could be,’ returned Gently evasively, ‘and then again, it couldn’t.’
He drank some more tea while Copping indulged in speculative ratiocinations. ‘It’d be easy to give the US military a ring… just to be sure.’
‘No,’ said Gently, kindly but firmly, ‘we’ll leave them to concentrate on Western Defence or whatever else it is they do in these parts…’
The Front had become its old gay self again by evening. Everybody hadn’t arrived yet — there were still momentary appearances of towering coaches hailing from Coventry, Leicester, Wolves and Brum, dusty from long journeying, their passengers lolling and weary — but enough had already arrived, enough had checked in at their lodgings, deployed their belongings, washed, changed, tea’d, and now sallied forth, cash in hand — they really spent with a will on the Saturday night. Remote from it all, the sea looked cold. Nobody wanted the sea on that day of the week. It was there, it was the alleged attraction, but that was all… and in the setting sun it looked cold and hard.
More interesting was the local Evening and the two Londons. They proclaimed the wisdom of having chosen this week for the holiday instead of last week. Last week, of course, the body had been found and the Yard called in, but it was pretty obvious from the way things were going that it would be this week when the mystery was solved, the arrest made… BODY IDENTIFIED BY LANDLADY ran the local — Lodger Said to Have Worn False Beard: Missing Suitcase — and there was a photograph showing Gently’s back and Copping posed at the top of the steps. The Londons didn’t get it early enough to feature. They had to be content with a stop-press and no pics. But they did their best. They whooped it up joyfully. IT WAS ROGER THE LODGER — AND HIS WHISKERS WERE PHONEY, one was captioned, BODY ON THE BEACH — WHY SHAVE IT? asked the other. Yes… things were moving. It was obviously the right week to be in Starmouth, quite apart from the races.
‘Can’t help feeling we’ve been mucked about, sir,’ observed Dutt, as the two of them turned the corner at the end of Duke Street, ‘all these new people… thahsands of them… and we know for a start they haven’t got nothink to do with it.’
Gently belched… those damned sausages! ‘It’s the ones who’ve gone that worry me,’ he muttered.
‘And then again, there’s him we’re going to pinch… could be any one of them, sir. This bloke coming along here, now, the one with the tasselled hat… I wouldn’t put it past him.’
Gently clicked his tongue. ‘You can’t go on that sort of thing, Dutt.’
‘I know, sir, but you can’t help thinking about it. This isn’t like the usual job — as a rule there’s one or two to have a go at. But this time there’s not a soul, not a blinking sausage’ — Gently winced at this unkind reference — ‘not a solitary bloke anywheres who you can lay your hand to your heart about. I mean, even that bloke with the scar, sir. What have we got on him, apart from him acting suspicious? I dare say he’s up to something he wouldn’t like us to know about, but honest now, what connection is that with the deceased? We’ve often put up pigeons like him on a job.’
Gently sighed, but the sigh was interrupted by a belch. ‘This is why we get on so well together, Dutt,’ he said bitterly, ‘your cockney common sense is the best foil in the world for my forensic intuition
…’
‘Well, there you are, sir. I don’t want to look on the black side
…’
‘Of course not, Dutt.’
‘But you’ve got to admit it’s still a bit speculative, sir.’
‘Highly speculative, Dutt… which is why we’re keeping firmly on the tail of any pigeons we put up.’
‘Yessir. Of course, sir.’
‘Including your man with a scar.’
‘I wasn’t presuming to criticize, sir…’
‘No, Dutt, please don’t… at least, not after I’ve been eating dogs in that damned canteen up there…!’
‘I’m sorry, sir… they was perishing awful dogs.’
They came to a side street running along blankly under the shadow of a Babylonian cinema, a brick vault of Edwardian foundation and contemporary frontage.
‘This is me, sir,’ said Dutt, halting, ‘I can work my way round and come out on the far side of Botolph Street.’
‘There’s cover there… you don’t have to lean on a lamp-post?’
‘There’s a builder’s yard with a gate I can get behind.’
‘We don’t want our pigeon frightened… if he’s there. I’ll give you twenty minutes to get set.’
‘That’ll be about it, sir.’
‘And if he gives any trouble put cuffs on him. My forensic intuition suggests you’ll be justified…’
Dutt turned off down the side street and Gently, with a dyspeptic grimace, crossed the carriageway and joined the noisy crowd jostling along the promenade. Everything was in full swing again, the lights, the canned music, the windmill sails, the crashing and spanging of the shooting saloon… a sort of fey madness, it seemed, a rash of inferno at the verge of the brooding ocean. He turned his back on it and leaned looking out at the cold water.
Dutt was right, of course. There was precious little connection. You could say Frenchy for certain, and that was all… and what did Frenchy add up to, even if you could prove it? A friendly foreigner dressed like a Yank and generous with his pound notes… he was natural meat for Frenchy. And of course she would lie. Of course she would dig up an alibi. Quite apart from anything else it was bad business for your last boyfriend to wind up a corpse on the beach.
And after Frenchy it was all surmise. There was nobody else who tied in at all, or not in a way that looked impressive when you wrote a report. He had wandered into town, this enigmatical foreigner, he had taken lodgings, he had found a cafe to his taste and a prostitute to his taste; and then he had been, in a short space of time, kidnapped, tortured, murdered and introduced into the sea, his room ransacked and plundered of something of value. There was a ruthlessness about that… it bore the stamp of organization. But there was no other handle. The organization persisted in a strict anonymity.
So he was left with his intuition, thought Gently, his intuition that made pictures and tried to fill them in, to make them focus, to eliminate their distressing areas of blankness. One didn’t know, one simply felt. With the facts firmly grasped in the right hand one groped in the dark with the left… and if you were a good detective, you were lucky. Mere intellect was simply not enough.
He swallowed and grimaced again. If ever he ate another sausage…!
There was an air of restraint in the bar of ‘The Feathers’, as though everybody had been put on their best behaviour. It wasn’t too full, either, considering it was Saturday night. The sporty type sat drinking whisky on a high stool, and one or two other less-than-salubrious characters whom Gently remembered from the previous night were scattered about the nearby tables. But there wasn’t any Jeff and Bonce, and there wasn’t any Frenchy… in fact, Gently noticed, there weren’t any women in the bar at all, not of any kind.
He went across to the counter and settled himself on a stool, one from the sporty type.
Artie and the latter exchanged a leer, but there was no comment made.
‘The usual?’ inquired Artie, with a slight sneer in his voice.
Gently quizzed his ferrety features. ‘You wouldn’t have any milk, by any chance?’
‘Milk!’ Artie almost snorted the word. ‘There’s a milk-bar just down the road!’
‘I’m serious… I want some milk.’
Artie eyed him balefully for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and snatched a glass from under the counter. ‘Boss’s orders,’ he sneered, ‘got to treat policemen like gentlemen.’ He ducked under the counter and disappeared through the adjacent door.
The sporty type tipped up the remains of his whisky. ‘If you’re looking for your girly, you won’t find her here, guv,’ he observed spiritously. ‘Louey’s had a purge — no women, no kids, and nothing out of line from no one… getting quite pally towards the coppers is Big Louey.’
Gently lifted his eyebrows. ‘It’s not a bad thing to be in most lines of business… what’s yours?’
‘What’s mine?’ The sporty type affected jocularity. ‘Ho-ho! I’ll keep on drinking what I’m drinking, and thank you very much!’
‘I mean your business,’ said Gently evenly.
‘Oh, me business… I was going to say it was the first time a copper ever asked me… well, there you are! I’m what you might call a Turf Consultant.’
‘You mean a tipster?’
‘Now guv, when we’re trying to add dignity to the profession…’
‘And you make a living at it?’
‘A bit of that and a bit of working with Louey. You don’t run a bookie’s business on your own.’
‘Well, you seem to do all right at it.’
The sporty type squirmed a little, but was relieved of the necessity of making a reply by the return of Artie with the glass of milk. He slammed it down perilously in front of Gently.
‘It’s on the house… with Louey’s compliments.’
Gently nodded and drank it slowly. He really needed that milk. Its soothing coolness flooded into his digestive chaos like a summons to order, nature’s answer to a canteen sausage. He drained the last drop and regarded the filmy glass with a dreamy eye. There were just a few things in life…
‘Louey got company?’ he asked Artie.
‘Nobody who’s worried by policemen.’
‘Tut, tut, Artie! I’m sure Louey wouldn’t approve of that attitude
… I was just wondering if he could spare me a few minutes.’
‘Why ask?’ retorted Artie, ‘just walk right in like every other cop.’
Gently shook his head. ‘You’ve got the wrong impression, Artie… you must have been rude to a policeman when you were a little boy.’ He slid off the stool and went over to the door. Then he paused, hand on the knob. ‘I suppose you didn’t have sausages for tea, Artie?’
Louey’s office was a comfortable room which exhibited a good deal of taste and some quiet expense. The walls were papered in two colours, maroon and grey, the floor was completely carpeted in grey to match and the pebble-grained glass windows, being on grey walls, had maroon curtains relieved by hand-blocked designs in dark blue. The furniture was in keeping. It was of discreet contemporary design showing Scandinavian influence. On the walls hung two coloured prints of race-horses after Toulouse-Lautrec, and under one of the windows stood a jardiniere of cream wrought-iron containing a pleasant assortment of indoor plants. There was a short passage separating the office from the bar: it had the effect of reducing the canned crooners in the arcade to a distant, refined murmur.
Louey sat sprawled in a chair by his desk when Gently entered. He was nursing a cat on his knees, a black-and-white tom with a blue ribbon round its neck and a purr like an unoccupied buzzsaw. On another chair was seated the parrot-faced man, still garbed in his dubious evening-dress and still armed with his yard of gold-plated cigarette-holder. Louey greeted Gently with a smile from which his gold tooth shone.
‘Pleased to see you, Inspector. I was wondering if you would honour us tonight.’
‘Indeed? Then I won’t be interrupting any business.’
Louey laughed his comfortable laugh and chivvied the tom with a huge hand. ‘No business tonight… it’s been a bad day for the punters. Not a favourite came home at Wolverhampton. A bad day, eh, Peachey?’
The parrot-faced man mumbled a nervous affirmative. He seemed equally apprehensive of both Gently and Louey. His small pale eyes wandered from one to the other, and he sat in his chair as though it were a penance to him.
‘Peachey’s my clerk,’ explained Louey, seeming to linger on the words, ‘he’s a good boy… very useful… aren’t you, Peachey? Very useful! But sit down, Inspector, make yourself at home… as a matter of fact, we’ve just been talking about you.’
‘Really?’
Louey smiled auriferously. ‘The evening papers… probably exaggerated… still, we feel you deserve congratulations. The inspector has got a long way in twenty-four hours, hasn’t he, Peachey — eh?’
Gently selected a chair upholstered in blue candy-stripe and swung it round, back to front. Then he seated himself heavily. Louey continued to smile.
‘Will you have a drink…? Some more milk, if you prefer it?’
‘No, thank you. I’ll just smoke.’
Louey swept up a silver box from the desk and inclined his gigantic frame towards Gently.
‘Try one of these… Russian. It’s a taste I’ve acquired.’
‘Thanks, but I smoke a pipe.’
‘You watch your health, Inspector.’
Such a polite and obliging Louey, thought Gently, as he stuffed his pipe-bowl. Who would have expected such polish from the Goliath who had bawled out the bar last night? There seemed to be two of him… one for out there and one for in here, a Jekyll and Hyde Louey. He glanced around the room. Certainly it wasn’t furnished by a moron…
‘You like my office?’ Louey leaned forward again with a lighter.
‘It’s not the usual sort of bookmaker’s office.’
The gold tooth appeared. ‘Perhaps I’m not the usual sort of bookmaker… eh? But most of my business is done in the outer office. I keep this one for myself and my friends.’
His eyes met Gently’s, frank, steady, even the sinister effect of the fleck in the pupil seeming softened and modified. We are equals, they were trying to say, you are a man like myself: I recognize you. When we talk together there is no need for subterfuge…
‘So you don’t know that prostitute, Frenchy?’ demanded Gently roughly — so roughly, in fact, that Peachey dropped his cigarette brandisher. But the grey eyes remained fixed unwaveringly upon his own.
‘I’m afraid not, Inspector… apart from warning her to leave the bar once or twice.’
‘Does he know her?’ Gently motioned towards Peachey with his head. Louey turned slowly towards his trembling clerk.
‘Go on… tell the inspector.’
‘I’ve s-spoken to her once or twice…!’ Peachey had a whining, high-pitched voice, oddly reminiscent of Nits.
‘Nothing else but that?’
‘N-no… honest I haven’t! Just in the bar… a joke…’
‘You’ve never seen her with this fellow?’ Gently whipped out one of the doctored photographs and shoved it under Peachey’s nose. The unhappy clerk shot back a foot in his chair.
‘Tell him,’ rumbled Louey, ‘don’t waste the inspector’s time.’
‘No… n-never… I never seen him at all!’
‘Then you know who he is?’ snapped Gently.
‘I tell you I never seen him!’
‘Yet you recognize the photograph?’
‘I never… I tell you!’
Louey broke in with his comfortable laugh and reached out a great hand to tilt the photograph in his direction.
‘I think he can guess, Inspector… it isn’t difficult, with all this talk of beards in the evening papers.’
‘I’m asking Peachey!’ Gently snatched the photograph out of Louey’s fingers. ‘You recognized him — didn’t you? You didn’t have to stop to work it out!’
‘It’s like Louey says!’ burst out Peachey in desperation, ‘I read about it in the papers… just like he says!’
Gently eased back in his candy-striped seat and laid the photograph on the corner of the desk. Louey studied it with interest, leaning his massive bald head a little to one side.
‘They’ve touched it up neatly… the beard looks quite convincing.’
Gently felt for his matches but said nothing.
‘No doubt he’s a foreigner,’ mused Louey, ‘what part of the world would you say he came from… Inspector?’
Gently shrugged and struck a match.
‘Of course, he could be a first-generation American… eh?’
Gently puffed a negative stream of smoke.
‘Perhaps not. I’ve a feeling I’m wrong.’
Gently reached out to drop his match in an ashtray.
‘Maybe Central European is nearer… or further east. Behind the Curtain, even?’ Louey’s eyes drifted slowly back to Gently, strong, assured.
‘The Balkans?’ suggested Gently quietly.
The grey eyes smiled approval. ‘That would be my guess, too. Or perhaps we could be more definite… after all, the cast of feature is very distinctive. Shall we say Bulgarian?’
Gently nodded his mandarin nod.
‘And — I think — a cultivated man… possibly Sofia?’
‘As you say… possibly.’
Still smiling, Louey fondled the purring tom which continued to loll on his knees. It stretched itself and yawned contentedly. Then it flexed its claws with an exaggerated expression of unconcern, whisked its tail and tucked its head under one of its paws.
‘Rain,’ said Louey, ‘it’ll make the going soft… eh, Peachey?’
Peachey was sitting with his mouth open and giving an imitation of someone expecting an atomic bomb to explode.
‘Then there’s the other one…’ murmured Gently, absently blowing a smoke-ring. ‘You were saying, Inspector?’
‘The man with the scar, doesn’t he strike you as belonging to the same racial group?’
There was a pause broken only by the muted skirl of electronic jazz. Louey’s fingers paused halfway along the tom’s back. Even Gently’s smoke-ring seemed to pause and hover, exactly between the three of them.
‘Do I… know him, Inspector?’ queried Louey in a finely-blended tone of frustrated helpfulness.
‘You should do. He was here last night.’
‘Last night? You mean here in the bar?’
‘I mean here in the office — this one or the outer one.’
There was a further pause while Louey shook his head perplexedly. ‘I don’t know… it’s rather puzzling. I’m afraid I’m not acquainted with a man with a scar — it’s a conspicuous scar, I suppose, something that stands out?’
‘Very conspicuous.’
‘And he was here in the office?’
‘He left at nine thirty-one.’
‘Someone saw him leave?’
‘Exactly.’
Louey looked hopelessly blank. ‘If I knew his name, Inspector…’
‘I intended to ask you for it.’
Louey sighed regretfully and reached out for the silver cigarette-box. ‘He couldn’t have been in here… I was here myself the whole evening. And as for the other office-’ he hesitated in the act of selecting a primrose-coloured cigarette — ‘Peachey!’
Peachey jerked as though yanked by a wire.
‘You were in the other office at half past nine… Peachey!’
‘B-but boss-!’
‘Now no excuses — you were working there till ten — you didn’t leave the place except to fetch me something from the bar. He was getting out accounts, Inspector… we do a good deal of postal work.’
‘But boss!’ interrupted the anguished Peachey.
Louey pinned him with an unanswerable eye. ‘Who was it, Peachey — who was the man with the scar? The inspector isn’t asking these questions out of idle curiosity, you know…’
Poor Peachey gaped and gasped like a hooked cod.
‘But wait a minute!’ boomed Louey, ‘half past nine — that must have been about the time I sent you for my whisky. Inspector’ — his eye dropped Peachey as a terrier drops a rat — ‘you were in the bar yourself just then, I believe. Did you notice Peachey come out, by any chance?’
Gently nodded reluctantly.
‘Of course! Perhaps you can tell us at what time?’
‘About half past nine… more or less.’
‘Half past nine! Then it seems that Peachey wasn’t in the office when this man of yours was alleged to have left. Is that what you wanted to tell me, Peachey — is it?’
Peachey gulped apoplectically. ‘That’s right, boss! I wasn’t there to s-see nobody!’
‘And nobody looked in before that… none of our regulars about their accounts?’
‘No, boss — no one at all!’
Louey extended a gigantic hand towards Gently. ‘Sorry, Inspector… it doesn’t look as though we can help much… does it?’
‘No,’ admitted Gently expressionlessly, ‘it doesn’t, does it?’
‘Of course, this man may have looked in while the office was unoccupied.’
Gently shook his head. ‘Let’s not bother about that one, shall we?’
The grey eyes smiled approval again and Peachey sagged down into his chair, breathing heavily. Louey lit his cigarette, slowly, thoughtfully.
‘You know, I’ve given this business a certain amount of thought, Inspector… one can’t be indifferent, with the Press making so much of it… and there are certain points which seem to stand out.’
Gently hoisted an inquiring eyebrow, but said nothing.
‘I admit in advance that I’m the merest amateur… naturally! But it’s just possible that being outside it, away from the… tactical problems?… I’m in a more favourable position to study the strategy.’
‘Go on,’ grunted Gently.
Louey inhaled deeply and raised his head to blow smoke above Gently’s face.
‘There’s this man… what is he doing here? A complete stranger — nobody knows him — the police don’t know him (at least, I presume they don’t?) — turning up one day at a popular English seaside resort — and disguised. What would bring him here? His motive is past guessing at. Why should anybody kill him when he got here? The motive is just as obscure.’
‘Robbery,’ suggested Gently, puffing some Navy Cut into a haze of Russian.
‘Robbery?’ The gold tooth showed lazily for a moment. ‘You’re forgetting, Inspector, he was reported to have been killed in cold blood. His hands were tied. Does that seem like robbery?’
‘It seems like more than one person being involved.’
‘Exactly… and that’s my point! It wasn’t the crime of an individual. All the facts are against it. The more you juggle with them, the more emphatic they become. It was an organized killing, an act carried out by a group of some description… who knows?’
The grey eyes slid up and fastened on Gently’s, holding him, commanding him.
‘A political killing, Inspector. The execution of a traitor… that’s my reading of the situation. Your man was a fugitive. He chose Starmouth for his haven. But the organization he had betrayed found him out and exacted justice… doesn’t that seem to fit what we know?’
Gently blew an exquisite ring.
‘I think it does… better than any other interpretation. I hope I’m wrong — for your sake, Inspector. I believe these political killings are planned with a care which makes detection onerous and arrests unlikely. But the odds seem to lie that way… at least to my amateur way of thinking.’
The smile strayed back into the magnetic eyes and Louey part snuffed, part sucked a tremendous inhalation of smoke.
‘I’d like you to know I appreciate your difficulties,’ he concluded, spilling smoke as he talked. ‘My admiration for your abilities won’t be lessened, Inspector… what can be done by the police in these cases I am sure you will do.’
Gently nodded towards a peak in Darien. Then he reached for the photograph, pulled out his pen and drew on the matt surface a clumsy circle divided by a line. Without looking he handed it to Louey. The big man took it and stared at it.
‘Is this something I should know about?’ he inquired softly.
Gently lofted a careless shoulder. ‘You were wearing it on your ring last night.’
‘My ring?’ Louey extended his hand to display his solitaire.
‘The one you were wearing last night.’
Louey hesitated a split second and then laughed. ‘No, Inspector, you are mistaken… this is the only ring I wear. Tell him, Peachey, tell him… I wear this diamond to impress the clients… eh?’
The miserable Peachey contrived to nod.
‘They like to do business with a man of substance… it’s paid for itself over and over again.’
Gently turned towards him. There was a glint of excitement in the masterful, smiling eyes.
‘So you see, you were mistaken, Inspector… you do see that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ murmured Gently, ‘I see it very plainly indeed.’
He didn’t have far to go outside before he was joined by Dutt. The sergeant’s cockney visage had a glum expression which told Gently all there was to know…
‘No pigeon, Dutt… the dovecote was empty.’
‘That’s right, sir. Not a flipping feather.’
‘I got the impression it might be. Everyone was so pleased to see me. A pity, Dutt. I get more and more interested in that laddie.’
‘We could put out a portrait parley, sir. He shouldn’t be difficult to pick up.’
‘I wonder, Dutt. My feeling is that he’s a bit of a traveller… it’s the docks and airports that’ll need an eye kept on them. On the other hand…’
‘Yessir?’
‘If he’s the bird I think him, it’s a matter of some curiosity why he’s hung around here so long already.’
‘You mean you know who he is, sir?’
‘I wouldn’t put my hand to my heart, Dutt. I’m of a suspicious character, like all good policemen. And then again… it doesn’t do to overestimate. There’s one thing, though: I want a sound sure ruling on the origin of that circle with a line through it.’
‘You mean that little charm, sir?’ queried Dutt, brightening.
‘I do indeed, Dutt — that little charm.’
‘Well, sir, I can tell you that right off the cuff… it came to me as I was standing there watching, sir. I knew I’d seen it before, like I said when we found it.’
‘Go on, man… stop beating about the bush!’
‘It’s the sign of the TSK Party, sir — I come across it when I was attached to the Special.’
Gently halted under the blaze of one of the multicoloured standards that afforested the Front. ‘And what,’ he inquired, ‘do we know about TSK Parties, Dutt?’
‘Not a darn sight, sir,’ replied Dutt, ‘not if you put it like that. It’s a sort of Bolshie outfit — they reckoned it picked up where the old Bolshie boys left off. They didn’t even know wevver Joe was backing it or not — sort of freelance it was, if you get me. That Navy sabotage business was TSK. We had some US Federal men attached to us — they’ve had a lot of trouble with them in the States.’
‘The States!’ echoed Gently, ‘It’s always the States. Have you noticed, Dutt, how the American eagle keeps worrying us as we go about our quiet Central Office occasions?’