The Toff on Fire by John Creasey Page A

story.
    Nor was the tale of murder.
    He could not get the sight of the old couple at Rose Cottage out of his mind. Why had anyone, the Doc or any human being, thought it necessary to snuff out their lives as if it did not matter?
    Who was the Doc?
    Why had he talked of driving him, the Toff, out of the East End? Was it simply to avenge pretty Jessica Gay? How right was Grice in believing that there were people in the East End who believed that he, Rollison, had failed them? The East End seemed a long way off, but to Rollison it was as much the heart of London as was Mayfair. He felt a longing to go back there, to meet old friends by the dozen, to prove Grice wrong, to walk along the narrow, mean streets past the houses which had withstood the years and the bombing.
    He made himself think of other things, and glared at the window, for no good reason, and tried to decide on the best thing to do next. Above everything else he wanted a reliable report from the East End on the Doc, and Ebbutt was the best source
    Why had Ebbutt been so cool?
    â€œI’d better have forty winks,” Rollison said. “If I tackle Maggie or anyone else in this shape, I’ll make a hash of it.”
    At any other time he would have asked Ebbutt to send men to watch Maggie’s hotel and Maggie herself, but Grice’s talk of distrust was too vivid in his mind. He had to tell the police, or else let Maggie wait for an hour or two; and certainly he had to rest.
    He went into his bedroom, glanced up at the top of the wardrobe, and suddenly wondered whether he could have been hoaxed. No; that man had shown genuine terror. He loosened his bow tie and collar, kicked off his shoes, and dropped on to the bed. Outside, the clear October sunlight showed that it was still no more than midday. Lying on his back, he telephoned Grice, not to say what had happened but to ask him whether the Wylies’ home was being guarded yet.
    â€œYes, all laid on,” Grice assured him.
    â€œFine,” said Rollison. “Thanks. Now I’m going to have forty winks.”
    He rang off, telling himself that he could tell Grice more when Galloway had been in the wardrobe for a few hours; he might talk more freely, then, and so give Rollison more that he could tell Grice.
    What else?
    There was this ‘Maggie’; his next job was to visit her. There was the baby, who should be quite safe now. There were the two fugitives from the Doc, Evie and Dan, who might now be his prisoners, and who might now be dead.
    There were the trophies.
    He had never realised how much they had meant to him. It had been easy to scoff at himself and the hobby of collecting, and at Jolly, his man, who had first disapproved of the trophy wall and finally become its curator. But now they were gone, almost certainly destroyed—
    Had he any reason for thinking that?
    There was no need to take them away to destroy them, that could have been done in the flat. So why had they been removed? He found himself wondering more about that, until it threatened to become an obsession. Then, with no warning at all, he dropped off to sleep.
    While he was asleep, many people were thinking about him.
    There was Esmeralda, sitting back in a taxi with a suitcase beside her, being taken from the Wylies’ Mayfair home to her flat in Shepherd Market. She looked very chic and sweet; she sat with her knees close together and her hands folded demurely in her lap, and she watched the whirl of London traffic wide-eyed, as if she had never seen anything like it in her life; but there was another expression in her eyes, a kind of wicked mischief.
    There was Jane Wylie.
    She was in the spare room which had once been her own children’s nursery, on the first floor of a large house in Mayfair, not ten minutes’ walk away from Gresham Terrace. The crib in which the baby slept was an old one. She stood looking down at the sleeping child, and her expression had the softness common to all women