BIGGLES AND THE PENITENT THIEF

‘What connexion could the theft of jewels worth a quarter of a million pounds from a shop in Regent Street, London, possibly have with a remote island off the coast of Labrador? The long trail that brought Biggles so far, with Bertie, Ginger and young Tommy Miller, was not ended when they touched down at Rankinton. Both Jack Fraser, the Mountie, and Angus Campbell, the silver fox farmer, were allies worth having when Biggles came up against the villainy of Raulstein and his American gunmen’.

by Captain W. E. Johns

First published September 1967

TITLE PAGE – Page 3

CONTENTS – Page 5

I. A CASE OF BAD LUCK (Pages 7 – 15)

“There was silence in the London flat Biggles shared with his friends; his pilots of the Air Police. It had persisted for some time. Bertie and Ginger were engaged in what seemed an interminable game of chess. Algy was engrossed in a book. Biggles half sat, half reclined, in an armchair with an ashtray overflowing with cigarette ends at his elbow. The hands of the clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten o’clock”. Biggles says he is going to put in some “blanket drill” and “Anyone who makes a noise when he goes to bed will incur my displeasure”. There is a tap on the door and it is the doorkeeper from the hall below saying there is someone to see Biggles. The person hasn’t given their name but said Biggles will know them when he sees them. A short, sturdy little man is shown up. “He looked on the wrong side of forty” and he wears an R.A.F. tie and says he served in Biggles squadron in “the good old days”. (He must mean the Second World War as if he was just 40 in 1967, he would have been 18 in 1945. He is too young to be a comrade from the First World War. In which case it would be 666 Squadron rather the 266 Squadron in which he served). “Miller’s the name, sir, 431 Corporal Miller, fitter-armourer. The boys called me Dusty”. Biggles remembers him. Miller is asking for advice about some “trouble”. “Well, get on with it. I’ll do the best I can,” promised Biggles, a trifle impatiently. Miller says there was a big jewel robbery at a shop in Regent Street at a place called Marchant’s where the crooks got away with “stuff reckoned to be worth a quarter of a million”. Miller knows “where the stuff is hid”. He explains that he was not one of the crooks but his son Tommy was. Biggles breaks in sharply to say “The police don’t bargain with crooks”. Miller asks to tell Biggles the whole story adding “If my boy Tommy is a crook it was a the police what made him one”. Biggles says to go ahead, “But before you begin, remember I’m a police officer, so it’s only fair to warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence. There are witnesses to this conversation. Miller explains how his son Tommy was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Tommy had a good job with Cluft’s, a company who specialize in locks and keys for safes. During a bus strike he hitched a lift in the pouring rain. The car had to stop at a road block and the driver ran off. Tommy was asked to move the car to let somebody else go through and was then pulled out of the car by the police because it was stolen. “He was taken to the police-station and charged with taking a car without the owner’s consent”. “To make a long story short, it ended with him getting three months in gaol. “He came out embittered, his nature warped and twisted, hating everyone, particularly the police”. Later, he met the man who was the driver who had run away and the man said he wanted to make things right with Tommy. This man was called Lew Darris. Darris persuaded Tommy to go with him to see his boss, “a sort of big-shot crook”, called Otto Raulstein. “His father was an Armenian and his mother Turkish”, but he is naturalized British. Tommy began to receive money from Raulstein “as he was broke at the time.” Miller says one day Tommy walked out and he didn’t see him again for over a year. He returned telling “such a tale as you’d find hard to believe”. Biggles asks Miller what he hopes to gain by coming to see him. “I thought p’raps if Tommy told you where the Marchant swag was hid you’d leave him alone” (meaning the police). Miller says the swag is the other side of the world. “I’m listening,” returned Biggles patiently, for by this time he was more than a little interested in the strange story the ex-airman was telling. He had already decided there was a ring of truth in it”. Miller says that Tommy was the sort of man Raulstein had been looking for to pull a big job. That was to break into the jewellers, Marchant’s in Regent Street, one weekend when there would be nobody there. Tommy was threatened and cajoled and persuaded to do the job. “One big job and that would be the lot, he promised. They’d all be rich for life. There wasn’t any risk. It was kids’ stuff. He’d got everything laid on for a clean getaway, which turned out to be true enough. They’d all be out of the country before the robbery was discovered”. (Actually, it would be a burglary if nobody was present. You have to threatened somebody with violence for it to be a robbery. So, for example “The Hatton Garden Job” of 2015, where they may have stolen as much as £200 million, the most lucrative crime of recent years was a burglary, not a robbery. Whereas the Brinks-Mat Job of 1983, where they got away with £26 million of gold – which would have been worth less than £100 million in 2022 – was a robbery due to the violence and threats made against the staff). Tommy agreed to it. “He’d no reason to stay here. He’d make a fresh start in another country”. Raulstein had an 800-ton diesel-engined yacht at moorings down at Ichenor, (West Ichenor is a real costal village seven miles south of Chichester in West Sussex on the manhood peninsula), fully provisioned for a long voyage with an engineer in charge. A car would get them to it once the swag was in the bag. “That’s when Tommy should have gone to the police,” remarked Biggles, shaking his head sadly. Miller says “He realizes that now, but he admits that at the time it was the last thing in his mind. He’d still got a chip on his shoulder about the police. Anyway, the job was done, as you know. There were three of ‘em in it. Lew Darris, the engineer from the yacht, who turned out to be an old lag named Grant wanted by the police, and Tommy. He would deal with the safes once they were inside. The others would do the breaking in”. Raulstein waited with the car in a nearby car park. Two hours later they were at sea in the yacht, named “Lapwing”. “It looked all over bar the shouting, but, as you’ll hear, it wasn’t, not by a long chalk. The troubles were about to begin”.