John Creasey - The Toff And The Stolen Tresses

“You got that note for Bill, Mr. Ar?”

“Yes, Micky. How are you keeping?”

“Oh, I don’t get no worse,” the man said, wrinkling his big nose, “and I don’t get no better. I can still walk.” He smiled and turned and hobbled off, a Bill Ebbutt pensioner suffering grievously from rheumatoid arthritis.

Rollison went into the shop.

Obviously it was very busy. Machines hummed, each chair in sight through open doors was occupied, smartly-dressed and well-made-up girls were flitting about. It was equally obvious that there was tension here. The queen of yesterday was not behind the desk; another girl was wearing a turban round her head, almost as if she had just had her hair washed; but Donny would not allow the staff or a customer to sit like that behind the cash desk.

Rollison said: “Good morning. Is Mr. Sampson in?”

The girl didn’t answer at once, but stared with her eyes narrowed, her lips set tightly; the way that Ada might have looked had he met her this morning; or Stella Wallis, last night. It seemed a long time before she spoke.

“Why don’t you go back to your part or London and forget the slumming?” she asked bitterly.

“I’d prefer to see Donny,” Rollison said mildly.

“He doesn’t want to see you. None of us wants to see you any more. If you hadn’t put your big nose in, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What wouldn’t have happened?” asked Rollison in the same mild voice, but now his heart was beginning to thump again: there seemed no end to the trouble that came without him knowing.

She snatched off the towelling turban and showed her fair hair, cropped close to the scalp. A woman without hair could look more naked than a nude.

“Now perhaps you’re satisfied,” she said viciously. “If you hadn’t—”

“I’m not satisfied by a long way,” Rollison told her softly. “Are you another of Donny’s daughters?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am, and I’ve talked to you quite long enough.” She twisted the turban back expertly, and became a normal woman again. “It’s happened to Leah and it’s happened to me. Don’t tell me you don’t know why.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Because you came to question Donny,” the girl said with the same bitterness. She leaned forward and pointed a red-tipped finger at him. “Because someone thinks Donny could help you, and they’ve got to make sure he doesn’t. They cut Leah’s hair off and then they cut off mine, just to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. I’m his third daughter, if you really want to know: I’m Lila. I don’t know what else they told Donny, but they threatened him with a lot worse than this if he has anything more to do with you. So why don’t you go and buy yourself a long holiday?”

Two customers were coming out, and they stood listening. Another coming in, stopped to stare. The machines whirred busily. Someone was talking in one of the cubicles, traffic passed noisily outside.

Then Donny appeared.

He looked older even than he had yesterday, and much more lined. There was sadness in his fine amber eyes and sadness in his gentle voice, too. He gazed with that familiar compassion at his daughter Lila, then turned to Rollison and said gravely:

“You must forgive Lila, she is so upset that she doesn’t know what she is saying. I will gladly talk to you, but I cannot help you. I have no idea why such a thing as this should happen, no idea at all.”

He did not smile; he looked saint-like, the kind of man to whom a lie would be not simply abhorrent but almost impossible.

But was he lying?

His daughter said with tears in her eyes: “You’re crazy! You ought to kick him out.”

“I’ll go without being kicked when I know where you get the hair for your wigs and toupees,” Rollison said to Donny. “How about it?”

Donny’s expression did not change.

“Please come with me,” he said, and Rollison went, aware of the girl staring at him as if she hated him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Wig-Maker

Donny walked past the door of the room where Rollison had sat yesterday, and led the way through a doorway at the end of the passage, and then up a short flight of steps. The paintwork was a more ordinary cream colour here, but the place was spotless; Donny did not just put up a front. As Rollison followed him along a narrow landing, seeing the bowed shoulders beneath the snow-white barber’s coat, he found himself trying to reconcile two conflicting things.

Donny was rich. He owned dozens, perhaps hundreds of shops. He owned a great deal of valuable property. Yet he worked in one of his own shops, cutting hair for customers, actively managing the whole concern. He might have been expected to work from an office, and to leave all the donkey work to others.

What was the explanation?

Was he so rich as Grice had made out?

Or was he a miser?

He opened a door into a long, narrow room, with a north light, a room which might have served excellently for an artist’s studio; but instead of canvases round the wall and paintings dotted all about, and instead of easel and palette and brushes, there were wigs and tresses of hair.

One long bench beneath the north light had at least twenty model heads on it, some bald and shiny, looking strangely like Lila without her turban, some with complete wigs on them, some with partly finished wigs, some with hair hanging down, some with hair brushed upwards, Edwardian fashion. Hanging from racks along the wall were tresses of hair of a great variety of sizes and shades and colours—from the fairest to the darkest, like the hair which had been fastened round the bricks last night. There were some small pots of liquid which looked like a kind of glue, and in a corner were several ovens; Rollison could not even guess their purpose.

Donny saw the question in his eyes.

“They are for dyed hair,” he explained. “We subject all dyed hair to the severest tests, to try to make sure that it doesn’t change under the most intemperate climatic conditions. It isn’t always possible to be absolutely sure, of course.” He showed some screens, not unlike the one on which Ada Jepson had her tapestry but threaded with hair, as if this was going to be the silkiest tapestry of all. “That is our matching screen,” Donny explained. “We take samples of hair from the customer’s head, and match it up—that is, for people who want a little extra help, or are balding, or wear a toupee.”

“The question is, where do you get the hair from?”

“I buy it.”

“Can you satisfy the police that you don’t buy it from the men who’re cutting hair off girls who want to enter for your beautiful hair competition?”

“I cannot prove where it comes from in the first place,” Donny said. “Much hair, often the best for my purpose, comes from India and the Balkans, but supplies are difficult. I buy from agents in London.”

“Who?”

“A small agency, run by a Mr. Samuel King,” Donny said. “The police asked me all this earlier, and they know his address. I can give it to you, if you insist, but if King thinks I am accusing him, then he may cut off my supplies. Need you go and see him, too?”

It was hard to suspect Donny.

It was easy to be fooled.

“I’ll check with Grice,” Rollison said. “Do you handle this part of the business yourself?”

“No, my eldest son is the expert. He’s a very clever chemist, and helps to prepare many of our lotions, some dyes and some rinses.”

Rollison looked at the unblemished skin and the lines which might have been carved out of I wax, and the saintliness which might hide something far more secular, and asked:

“If the hair of a dozen girls was cut off each week, what would it be worth?”

Donny answered quietly:

“Possibly a hundred to a hundred and twenty pounds.”

“Do you think that’s why so much is being cut off?”

Donny said:

“I simply don’t know, Mr. Rollison.”

“Lila thinks you know why hers and Leah’s was cut off.”

“Lila is very young and highly strung, and she is absurdly fond of her old father,” Donny I said gently.

“Or does she know that you’re being high pressured?”

“She cannot know what isn’t true.”

Rollison said in the same tone and without any change of expression:

“Why did you hire Wallis to beat-up the barber who wouldn’t sell out?”

Donny spread his hands.

“I did not intend Wallis to use force.”

“Just threats of force?”

Donny didn’t answer.

“I think you were compelled by someone else to put Wallis and Clay on to that barber,” Rollison said. “Who’s putting the pressure on you?”

“There is nothing I can tell you, Mr. Rollison.”

“Someone put sharp pressure on you to prevent you from talking freely to me,” insisted Rollison. “It won’t work. Black is black, and white is white, and you’ve always been on the side of the angels. You’re old enough to know that the end doesn’t justify the means. You’re old enough in the ways of the East End to know that if you let yourself be frightened into silence now, the pressure will get worse and worse. Who’s after you, Donny?”

“I don’t think we’ll serve any useful purpose by continuing with this conversation,” said the barber quietly, “and I have a lot of work to do. Will you excuse me?”

Rollison took one of the lists from his pocket, and said:

“Look at this.”

Donny studied it, reading without glasses. His lips tightened a little, and he shot a swift glance at Rollison, then looked back at the list. He nodded at last.

“What is it?” Rollison asked.

“The list of Wallis victims.”

“Or yours?”

“Only one could be blamed onto me,” said Donny, and seemed to wince.

“Do you know any of the others?”

“One of them is a wholesaler who has done a little business with me from time to time. I buy some of my supplies from him.”

“Hairdressing supplies?”

“Yes, the goods I sell.”

“Does he sell Jepsons’ goods?”

“Most wholesalers sell some Jepson goods,” Donny said. “Mr. Rollison, I’m sorry, but—”

The telephone bell rang. Donny seemed relieved and hurried to lift the receiver.

“This is Sampson,” he said in his precise way. “Yes, I will come at once.” He put the receiver down and said almost sadly: “Superintendent Harrison of the Division wants to see me again,” he told Rollison. “I must go.”

Harrison was one of the younger men, recently moved from the Yard to take over the Division. Rollison knew him more by reputation than by acquaintance. Today, he obviously did not intend to waste time with the Toff, and was almost brusque. Rollison went out, and saw a police car and two plainclothes men standing at the kerb, but no crowd was about today. The girl Lila was still at the cash desk, and there was still no friendliness in her manner. Rollison was actually outside when he turned round and went back to her.

Donny and Harrison and a sergeant had gone along the passage.

“First you, then the police,” she said. “You’re just bad news itself.”

“Lila, try to forget that you don’t like me for a minute, and put me into the picture, will you? You’ve six brothers and sisters in all, haven’t you?”

Any law against that?”

“What kind of a family is it, Lila?”

She drew in a deep breath.

“It’s the finest family in London, and I don’t care what kind of families your duke and aristocratic friends have! My father is the finest man in the world, bar none. He and mother have lived the happiest life anyone possibly could. There isn’t one of us kids who wouldn’t die for them if it would help them, and that goes for the in-laws, too. Why don’t you go away and leave us in peace?”