He removed the biscuit tin skilfully, and tipped the rashers with their succulent fat on to a cracked enamel plate. He produced a knife and fork and a great chunk of bread. Standing up, he set a kettle on the fire, then sat down again, and, the plate on the plank beside him, began very composedly to eat his supper.
“Yes, it is funny,” Nayland Smith went on. “I was down there for my paper on the story of that raid in Chinatown. But all the suspects slipped away. It would be last Saturday night, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” said the night watchman, his mouth full of hot bacon. “That would be the night.”
He dropped some tea into a tin pot, set it on the ground beside him, and continued stolidly to eat his bacon.
“A night wasted,” Nayland Smith mused aloud. “And what a night it was! What ho! The fog.”
“It certainly were foggy.”
“The blooming coppers had something up their sleeve; they kept it to themselves.”
“You’re right, mister.” He spat out a piece of bacon rind, picked it up, contemplated it critically and then threw it on the fire. “Coppers is a lousy lot!”
“Wish I’d stopped for a chat with you, that night, and a spot over the fire.” Nayland Smith leaned across the rail and passed a flask to the night watchman. “Slip a gill in your tea. I’m homeward bound with a couple of pals. I sha’n’t need it.”
“Blimey!” cried the night watchman, unscrewed the flask and sniffed the contents. “Thanks, mister. This is a bit of all right.”
“Those blasted chinks,” Sir Denis continued, “slipped out of that place as though they’d been dissolved,”
“How many, guv’nor?”
“Four, I think they were looking for.”
Mingled with the sound of whisky trickling into a tin mug, came a muted rumbling which examination of the face of the night watchman might have suggested to an observer to be due to suppressed mirth; then:
“You might have done worse than stop for a chat with me, guv’nor,” said the man, re-screwing the flask and returning it to Sir Denis.
CHAPTER 51
NIGHT WATCHMAN’S STORY
“It was this way with me,” the night watchman continued, endeavouring to chuckle and eat bacon at the same time, “as I told the young scab of a copper down there what come walkin’ by. He says ‘you’ve ‘ad one over the eight, haven’t you?’ he says. See what I mean, mister?”
“I know those young coppers,” snapped Nayland Smith, glancing at Gallaho. “They’ve got no sense.”
“Sense!” The night watchman made a strong brew of tea. “What I want to know is: how do they get into the Force? Answer me that: how do they get into the Force? Well, this bloke I’m tellin’ you about. . . .”
The dammed up stream of traffic was trickling slowly past the obstruction, under Constable Ireland’s direction. Things were going fairly well. But nevertheless it was difficult to hear the speaker, and Nayland Smith and Gallaho bent over the red barrier, listening intently. Petrie craned forward also, his hand resting on Gallaho’s shoulder.
“This bloke says to me,” the night watchman repeated, “‘ad one over the eight, haven’t you?” So I didn’t say no more to him, except, ‘Bloody bad luck to you if you ain’t’. That was what I said.”
With all the care of a pharmacist preparing a prescription, he added a portion of whisky from the tin cup to a brew of hot tea in a very cracked mug.
“I let him go—it’s silly talkin’ to coppers. He went away laughin’. But the laugh was mine, if I says so—but the laugh was mine! I’ll tell you what I told ‘im, mate—I told him what I see.”
He swallowed a portion of bread and bacon.
“You’re a newspaper man. Well, you’d have got your story all right, if you stopped, like you wanted to do, that night. What a story. Here it is. I work for a firm, if you follow what I mean; I ain’t a Council man—that’s why I travels so much. Very well. The same firm what done this job ‘ere was on the Limehouse job. . . .”
He added sugar and condensed milk from a tired looking tin to the brew in the mug, stirred it with a piece of wood and took an appreciative sip.
“Good ‘ealth, mister. Where I’m workin’ in Limehouse is on West India Dock Road and not far from the corner of the old Causeway. That’s where you see me, if I heard you right.”
“That’s it,” said Smith patiently; “ a grand fire you had.”
“I’d got some chestnuts,” chuckled the night watchman. “I remember as well as if it were an hour ago, and I’d roasted ‘em and I was eating ‘em. Did you notice me eating ‘em?”
“No, he didn’t,” growled Gallaho; “at least, he never told me he did.”
Nayland Smith grasped the speaker’s arm.
“Oh, didn’t he?” said the night watchman, lifting a tufted eyebrow in the direction of the detective.
“Well, I was. And through the fog there, what did I see? . . .”
He drank from the mug. Rain had begun to fall; the roar of the passing traffic rendered it necessary to bend far over the red pole in order to hear the man’s words. He set down his mug and stared truculently from face to face.
“I’m askin’ a bloody question,” he declared. “What did I see?”
“How the hell do I know, mate?” Gallaho shouted, in the true vernacular, his voice informed by suppressed irritation.
The night watchman chuckled. This was the sort of reaction he understood.
“Course you don’t know. That’s why I ask’ you ... I see a trap what belongs to the main sewer open from underneath. Get that? It just lifted—and first thing I thought was: an explosion! It wasn’t no further from me than”——he hesitated,—”that bus. It was lifted right off. There’s nobody about;
it’s the middle of the night. It was set down very quiet on the pavement, and what did I see then? . . .”
He took another sip from his mug; he had finished the bread and the bacon. Gallaho had sized up his witness, and:
“What did you see, mate?” he inquired.
“Here’s a story for the newspapers,” the watchman chuckled, as Nayland Smith reached across the barrier and offered him a cigarette from a yellow packet. “Thanks, mister—here’s a story!”
He succeeded in some mysterious way in lighting the cigarette from the fire in the brazier.
“A Chinaman popped up . . .”
“What!”
“You may well say ‘what’! But I’m tellin’ you. A Chinaman popped up out of the trap.”
“What kind of a Chinaman?”
Nayland Smith was the speaker, but in spite of his eagerness he had not forgotten to retain the accent.
“Looked like a Chinese sailor, as much as I could see of ‘im through the fog—not that there was a lot of fog at the time;
but there was some—there ‘ad been more. He took a look round. I sat quiet by my fire because, as I told that lousy cop what laughed at me, I thought for a minute I was dreamin’. Then he bent down and ‘elped another Chinese bloke to come up. The second Chinese bloke was old. He was an old Chinee, he were. . . .”
“What did he wear?” Smith inquired, pulling out a notebook and pencil, casually.
“Ho, ho!” chuckled the watchman. “I thought you’d want to make some notes. He wore a kind of overcoat and a tweed cap. But although I couldn’t see his face, I know it was a very funny face—very old and ‘aggard, and he were very tall——”
“Very tall?”
“That’s what I said—Very tall. Another bloke come up next——”
“Also a Chinaman?”
“Likewise Chinese, wearin’ a old jersey and trousers with his ‘ead bare. He bent back like the first bloke had done, and ‘auled up another Chinese——”
“Not another one,” growled Gallaho, acting up to the situation.