Between the Napoli and the garage, and next door to the flower shop, there was a tiny bistro, calling itself the Bijou. On fine days it put four tables out on the pavement and served coffee and patisseries. One of the tables was unoccupied. Alleyn walked past the van and flower shop, sat at the table, ordered coffee and lit his pipe. He had his back to the pottery but got a fair reflection of it in the flower shop window.
Gomez and Chubb were near the flat door. The Colonel still leant against it, looking dreadfully groggy. Chubb stood back a little way with his fingers to his mouth. Gomez seemed to be peering in at the curtained shop window.
He was joined there by Inspector Fox, who had arrived via Capricorn Place. He appeared to search for an address and find it in the pottery. He approached the shop door, took out his spectacles, read the notice Closed for stocktaking and evidently spoke to Gomez, who shrugged and turned his back.
Fox continued down the Mews. He paused by the talented Sergeant Jacks, again assumed his spectacles and bent massively towards the drawing. Alleyn watched with relish as his colleague straightened up, tilted his head appreciatively to one side, fell back a step or two, apologized to a passer-by and continued on his way. When he reached the table he said: “Excuse me, is that chair taken?” and Alleyn said: “No. Please.”
Fox took it, ordered coffee, and when he had been served asked Alleyn the time.
“Come off it,” Alleyn said. “Nobody’s looking at you.”
But they both kept up the show of casual conversation between strangers.
Fox said: “It’s a funny set-up back there. They act as if they don’t know each other. The Colonel seems to be on the blink. If you poked a finger at him, he’d fall flat.”
“What about the premises?”
“You can’t see anything in the shop. There’s curtains almost closed across the window and no light inside.”
He blew on his coffee and took a sip.
“They’re in a funny sort of shape,” he said. “The Gomez man’s shaking. Very pale. Gives the impression he might cut up violent. Think they’ve skedaddled, Mr. Alleyn? The Sanskrits?”
“It would have to be after nine-ten this morning, when Sanskrit was seen to go home.”
“That copper with the crayons reckons they couldn’t have made it since he’s been on the job.”
“He dodged up the garage alley to talk to me, he might remember. Of course that damn bomb scare drew Fred Gibson’s men off. But, no. I don’t think they’ve flitted. I don’t think so. I think they’re lying doggo.”
“What’s the drill, then?” Fox asked his coffee.
“I’ve got a search-warrant. Blow me down flat, Br’er Fox, if I don’t take a chance and execute it. Look,” Alleyn said, drawing on his pipe and gazing contentedly at the sky. “We may be in a bloody awkward patch. You get back to the car and whistle up support. Fred’s lot ought to be available again now. We’ll move in as soon as they’re on tap. Call us up on the artist’s buzzer. Then we close in.”
“What about Gomez and the Colonel? And Chubb?”
“We keep it nice and easy but we hold them. See you on the doorstep.”
Fox put down his empty cup, looked about him, rose, nodded to Alleyn, and strolled away in the direction of Capricorn Walk. Alleyn waited until he had disappeared round the corner, finished his coffee, and at a leisurely pace rejoined Sergeant Jacks, who was touching up his architectural details.
“Pack up,” Alleyn said, “and leave your stuff up the alley there. You’ll get a shout from Mr. Fox in a matter of seconds.”
“Is it a knock-off, sir?”
“It may be. If that lot, there, start to move, we hold them. Nice and quiet, though. All right. Make it quick. And when you get the office from Mr. Fox, come out here again where I can see you and we’ll move in. Right?”
“Right, sir.”
The delivery van from the Napoli lurched noisily down the Mews, did a complicated turn-about in front of the pottery, and went back the way it had come. Alleyn moved towards the pottery.
A police-car siren, braying in Baronsgate, was coming nearer. Another, closer at hand, approached from somewhere on the outer borders of the Capricorns.
Sergeant Jacks came out of the garage alleyway. Fox and Gibson had been quick.
Gomez walked rapidly up the Mews on the opposite side to Alleyn, who crossed over and stepped in front of him. The sirens, close at hand now, stopped.
“Mr. Sheridan?” Alleyn said.
For a moment the living image of an infuriated middle-aged man overlay that of the same man fifteen years younger in Mr. Whipplestone’s album. He had turned so white that his close-shaved beard started up, blue-black, as if it had been painted across his face.
He said: “Yes? My name is Sheridan.”
“Yes, of course. You’ve been trying to call upon the Sanskrits, haven’t you?”
He made a very slight movement: an adjustment of his weight, rather like Mr. Whipplestone’s cat preparing to spring or bolt. Fox had come up behind Alleyn. Two of Gibson’s uniform men had turned into the Mews from Capricorn Place. There were more large men converging on the pottery. Sergeant Jacks was talking to Chubb and Fred Gibson loomed over Colonel Cockburn-Montfort by the door into the flat.
Gomez stared from Alleyn to Fox. “What is this?” he lisped. “What do you want? Who are you?”
“We’re police officers. We’re about to effect an entry into the pottery and I suggest that you come with us. Better not to make a scene in the street, don’t you think?”
For a moment Gomez had looked as if he meant to do so, but he now said between his teeth: “I want to see those people.”
“Now’s your chance,” said Alleyn.
He glowered, hesitated, and then said: “Very well,” and walked between Alleyn and Fox towards the pottery.
Gibson and the sergeant were having no trouble. Chubb was standing bolt upright and saying nothing. Colonel Cockburn-Montfort had been detached from the bell, deftly rolled round and propped against the door-jamb by Gibson. His eyes were glazed and his mouth slightly open, but like Chubb he actually maintained a trace of his soldierly bearing.
Four uniform men had arrived and bystanders had begun to collect.
Alleyn rang the bell and knocked on the top of the door. He waited for half a minute and then said to one of the policemen: “It’s a Yale. Let’s hope it’s not double-locked. Got anything?”
The policeman fished in his breast pocket, produced a small polythene ready-reckoner of a kind used for conversion to metric quantities. Alleyn slid it past the tongue of the lock and manipulated it.
“Bob’s your uncle,” the constable murmured and the door was open.
Alleyn said to Fox and Gibson, “Would you wait a moment with these gentlemen.” He then nodded to the constables, who followed him in, one remaining inside the door.
“Hullo!” Alleyn called. “Anyone at homer
He had a resonant voice, but it sounded stifled in the airless flat. They were in a narrow lobby hung with dim native cloth of some sort and smelling of dust and the stale fumes of sandarac. A staircase rose steeply on the left from just inside the door. At the far end on the right was a door that presumably led into the shop. Two large suitcases, strapped and labelled, leant against the wall.
Alleyn turned on a switch and a pseudo-Oriental lamp with red panes came to life in the ceiling. He looked at the labels on the suitcases: Sanskrit, Ngombwana. “Come on,” he said.