Chapter Eight: Inspector Wheeler’s Chinese Takeaway

Chapter Eight: Inspector Wheeler’s Chinese Takeaway

“One chicken in black bean sauce, one sizzling king prawns, one crispy beef and some egg fried rice. Yes, that’s it. And - why not? - a couple of wee spring rolls, as well. No, no, I’ll be collecting it myself. I’ll be seeing you shortly, then.”

The Inspector opened his front door onto an untended garden and walked into the drizzly night with a big grin on his face. He had not felt so cheerful in weeks. Today had taken ten years off him. He walked to the car with a spring in his step and slammed the door shut. He brushed the sweet wrappers and the pile of crumbs off the passenger seat, switched the seat heater onto high and rubbed his cold hands together gleefully. Ninety-nine times out of hundred you had to have the patience of Job to see your hunches come to fruition but today, he told himself, he had been on outstanding, no stupendous form, and the result had been spectacular! Spec-tac-u-lar! Even Sergeant Chadwick had forgotten not to look impressed.

It was sheer coincidence that he had been in New Scotland Yard when a colleague was showing his team CCTV footage of a baffling robbery in one of London’s most exclusive jewellers. The Inspector stood in the doorway sipping a cup of strong, sweet coffee as the video was played over and over again in slow-motion.

The thief had walked calmly into the shop with a sledge hammer, forced all the staff out into the street at knife point and locked the door behind them. Then, as they all stood there, open-mouthed with horror, they watched the thief, who wore a mask and a knitted hat, smash every glass display cabinet in the shop and drop countless pieces of priceless jewellery into a large carrier bag. By now every alarm in the shop was going off and the first police car to respond to the staff’s frantic telephone calls for help had arrived. Unperturbed the thief merely stood stock still in the middle of the shop and – there was no other word for it - vanished in front of everyone’s eyes.

All sorts of theories were put forward, from mass hallucination to developments in nano-technology (one of the policeman had read an article about a chameleon-like material designed to take on the appearance of whatever it was put next to). Inspector Wheeler, however, was less interested in the ‘how’ than the ‘who’. He was surprised, though pleased, that no one else had spotted the similarity between the thief’s inexplicable disappearance and the ghostly shenanigans in the Schock/Dyer missing children case. True, the thief was not wearing eighteenth-century dress as the children had been in the other incidents, but the way that he had disappeared was identical. He presumed that this was because most people seemed to have categorised these previous incidents as manifestations of the supernatural – something which Inspector Wheeler had never been prepared to do. It was not instantaneous. The thief faded over a period of a several seconds so that at one point he became transparent and slightly out of focus. The Inspector would never forget seeing the ghostly vision of Kate Dyer lying between the goalposts at her school near Bakewell. She had disappeared before he could get to her. He was now convinced that he had witnessed the first example of this mysterious fading phenomenon. And where had Miss Kate Dyer disappeared to now? Could it be that her second disappearance was linked to this thief in any way? He had always had his doubts about the motives of the Dyer family and that Dr Pirretti woman for that matter. He was convinced that she had feigned that highly convenient fainting fit when he had questioned her about the children’s disappearance before Christmas. The hospital had been unable to find anything wrong with her - which came as no surprise to him for she was the picture of health. He knew her type. Organic bean sprouts and jogging. You wouldn’t catch someone like Dr Pirretti indulging in a Chinese takeaway. He shrugged. Why was he letting that woman get to him? Besides, what did he care? He had just engineered the first clue in the most baffling case he’d dealt with in three decades.

Another possible connection to the thief intrigued him. He had seen footage from surveillance cameras of the notorious mad horseman denting the roofs of twenty black cabs down Oxford Street over the New Year. Now that character was in fancy dress. When he saw the thief moving about in the shop it occurred to him that these two men could be one and the same person. It was something about the way he held himself. He had a certain economy of movement, a certain physical poise – and he had a stiff neck. Eyewitness accounts from terrified shoppers on Oxford Street indicated that the horseman had a bad scar down one cheek. It was dark, of course, and he wore a large hat, nonetheless, three independent witnesses were sure they saw a scar.

The robbery was not, of course, his case and he was reluctant to make a formal request for co-operation - at least not yet. So he had called in a few favours and arranged, discreetly, for six officers, in plain clothes, to patrol the top half dozen jewellers in central London. If they saw a man with a scar and a suspected neck injury they were to arrest him on suspicion of attempted theft and inform him immediately.

At five o’clock that afternoon, less than twenty-four hours since the beginning of the operation, one of his men, at a Knightsbridge jewellers, spotted and detained a man with a scar. The arresting officer called the Inspector from the police van en route to West Kensington police station. “You should have seen him, Sir,” he said, “He’s either totally reckless or stupid. He walked right up to one of the cameras and tapped it with his fingernail - which was black by all accounts.”

Inspector Wheeler gave instructions for the suspect to be put in a holding cell for the night and said that he would drive back down to London to interview him first thing in the morning.

Inspector Wheeler collected his celebratory take-away and bought a couple of bottles of beer on the way home. As he stood at the front door, juggling the take-away, the bottles and his door key, a voice startled him and he all but dropped his beer.

“Can I hold something, Sir?”

“Sergeant Chadwick! Do you want to give me a heart attack?”

“Sorry, Sir. I wanted to break the news to you in person.”

“What news?”

“The guy with the scar. He vanished again. The van doors were locked. They were stuck in traffic at Hyde Park Corner and one minute he was there and the next he was gone…They’ve got no idea how he got out.”

“Are you telling me they’ve lost him?”

“’Fraid so, Sir. They’re calling him the new Houdini.”

Inspector Wheeler thrust the bag of Chinese food at Sergeant Chadwick’s chest.

“You have it. I’ve lost my appetite.”