‘That should give you a few days’ start.’
I heard a sniffy snigger. ‘I shall pull back the top bolt. I have already loosened the hasp on the lower, so a few kicks should do the trick.’ The precise enunciation did not sound forced. ‘I shall say go when it’s done. Ready?’
I did not reply. I was too busy listening. I did not think the bolt could be drawn back without my hearing it so, if I could break out with one effort, the whisperer would have hardly any start on me at all. I pressed my ear to the wood and thought I heard footsteps running over the grass, going away. Was it possible I had missed it? But then I heard the barrel slide back.
I sat down heavily, leaned back against the inside of the oak tree, pulled my knees up and kicked out as hard as I could on the lower crossbar. There was a crack and the door flew open. I clambered up, stumbling out into the glorious wet fresh night air, torch in hand, sweeping the green. It was not possible to have run or cycled out of the square in the few seconds it took me to escape and I had not heard a car engine, but there was nobody in sight. Was he hiding behind a tree?
‘Where are you?’ I shouted uselessly. ‘You can’t get away.’
There were footsteps racing, fading away. I rushed round the tree and caught my foot, nearly tripping – a length of garden twine tangled round my feet and I saw that the end was tied to the upper bolt. It was difficult to be sure which way it had gone after my clumsiness, but it seemed to point towards the south-eastern exit of the Soundings heading towards the sea. I hurried along it and saw that the other end, about thirty feet away, I guessed, was tied to a stone. Somebody had retracted the bolt with the twine and thrown the end back towards the door. It could have come from any direction.
There was nothing for it but to head north-west, back into the town centre and Gordon Street as instructed.
A group of men and women were coming out of the Leg O’ Lamb. Saint Jaspar Divers must have been doing a good trade for they were not exactly sober. They were not exactly disorderly either, though they were belting out ‘If I catch you bending I’ll saw your legs right off’ from that bloody awful ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. Elsie and Doris Waters – lovely as they were – had a lot to answer for. I dashed past.
‘He went that way,’ a man in a donkey jacket called and I spun round to see him pointing in both directions at once, the little scallywag.
‘Oh you are a card.’ His female companion slapped him on the back. I could have done that and much harder, if I had had the time.
I turned down Germaine Street. It used to be German Street before the Great War and there were calls now to rename it after Haig. The street was cobbled and wet cobbles are slippery. I skidded, fell sideways and hit my stump on a wall.
‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ they catcalled after me, these people I was sworn to protect.
‘Foxx kemm ghandek,’ I muttered – a Maltese obscenity Adam had taught me – and ran on, trying to keep to the narrow pavement, blocked in places by dustbins because the houses had no backyards.
Germaine Street joined Gordon Street about halfway along. I turned right and ran to the phone box on the corner. This was on a crossroads, where I stopped and peered in every direction. There was no sign of anyone, the only sound being Mother-bloody-Brown coming out of the Three Farthings accompanied by a badly tuned piano. Was our strategy – in case of invasion – to annoy the Germans to death?
Those two scraggy girls were crammed into the box, the door wedged open with an empty rusty tin of bully beef.
‘Farewell my own true lover,’ the scrawny girl was sobbing.
Her scrawnier friend nudged her. ‘Tell him you’ll write,’ she prompted.
‘Oi’ll write every day.’ She covered the mouthpiece. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Dunno,’ her friend said, ‘just call him darlin’.’
‘My darlin’,’ she concluded, then raised her voice. ‘No, I don’t want to put any more money in, thank you, operator lady. I do got two more darlin’s to ring yet. What d’you mean he heard tha’? Well, tha’ was a waste o’ fourpence.’
I pulled open the door. ‘I’m sorry, police business.’ And to my surprise they acquiesced cheerfully.
‘Come on. Just got enough for a pack of fags.’ The scrawny one rattled the coins in her pocket. ‘And there’s tha’ new aircraft engineer with the big…’ she giggled, ‘piston.’
So off they went, the flower of English womanhood.
I opened the door and realised why they had propped it open. Somebody had decided it made a good urinal and it smelt like many of his friends had agreed with him.
The phone rang and I put my hand on the receiver.
‘Oh,’ Scrawny cried, ‘that’ll be Jethro.’
‘You jus’ spoke to him,’ Scrawnier reminded her.
‘Or Jed.’
‘Could be Jed.’
‘Go away.’ I picked up the receiver. ‘Hello.’
‘You took your time,’ the whisperer said.
‘Well, I…’
‘Willy. She said Willy,’ Scrawny yelped in excitement. ‘She’s trying to make off with your Willy.’
‘But I don’t know any Willys,’ Scrawnier puzzled, ‘except…’
I forced the door shut but could still hear them squawking.
‘Last game,’ the whisperer said. ‘You have fifteen minutes to get to the Pier Pavilion. The right-hand side gate and the front door are unlocked. Be in the stalls with the money or the girl dies.’
‘It’s quite a long way.’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ the whisperer said. ‘Starting… now.’ And the line went dead.
96
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE
I dialled. ‘Come on.’ It seemed to take for ever for the dial to whir back before I put the next number in. At least it was a direct line so I didn’t have to wait for Maggie, the Sackwater Telephone Exchange night operator, to put down her darning and try to strike up a conversation. ‘Come on.’
There was a click, a lot of throat-clearing and a ‘What now?’ from Brigsy.
I didn’t have time to ask if he meant: Good evening, Sackwater Central Police Station.
‘Briggs, this is Inspector Church.’
‘Oh gawd I thought it do be Algy playing silly boogers again.’
‘Is anybody else there?’
‘Welllll…’ A brief pause. ‘No.’
‘I am going to the Pier Pavilion.’
‘I do believe it’s closed, ma’am,’ he warned to avoid disappointing me.
‘I know. Try to contact the men on the beat and tell them to stay away but, if you don’t hear from me in exactly one hour, you are to send as many officers as you can get hold of, regardless of whether they’re on duty or not. Got that?’
‘Including Old Scrapie?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I put down the phone. If I’d have known the bugger was back I’d have thrown a party.
I looked at my watch. It had a good strong luminous dial. Thirteen minutes to go. The scrawnies were still squawking.
‘The fret of it is, I do love ’em all.’
‘But there’s not one as you want to marry.’
‘Gawd no. They’re fraugsy?’
Fraugsy? I hadn’t heard that one before.
The streets were quiet now. Nobody wanted to socialise in the pitch-dark and tales of wicked men loitering unseen were spreading feverishly – in fact there were more definitely true stories than there were men in the district.
I was off. Most of Victorian Sackwater had been built within a twenty-year period and laid out on a grid system. The older part was more the product of evolution, streets following old lanes or heading towards dairies or tanneries long since gone. Slaughterhouse Lane hadn’t had an abattoir in my lifetime but it was still wider than most of the lanes, for driving animals to their deaths.
At the corner of Derby Street the police phone was ringing. Brigsy would be doing his best. In peacetime there was a light on top of the boxes that flashed to alert any constables to
a call. Now you just had to hope they heard it or a member of the public told them.
I cut through Tiny Rupert Square but decided against Divine Alley in case Bressinghall’s the butcher’s had blocked the far end with their van. I skirted round Amity Street, taking the long way round Chapel Street and Peacock Lane, only to find Bressinghall’s had left their van where they had no right to and were blocking the exit to Dorking Road. There was no room to squeeze round it and I could not climb over or wriggle under it. There were six minutes to go. I tried the back doors and found them unlocked. The van was filled with wooden trays on runners. It had a solid barrier between it and the driver’s cab, so I couldn’t get through the vehicle. I ripped half the shelves out into a heap on the cobbles and, using them as rickety steps, managed to scramble onto the roof and over it and slide down the windscreen to land on the cobbles, skittering on both feet and catching my stump on the bumper in the process.
‘Haqq qahba kurnut,’ I cursed and stumbled on my way.
Peacock Lane leads out onto Dorking Road, parallel with High Road East and sloping down to the promenade, with a clear view of the old pier before me. The pavilion stood at the entrance to the pier, a sort of cross between a railway terminal and a cathedral with a nod to the Orient. It was a tall rectangular building with an arched roof and a tower at each corner topped by onion domes. In happier times the great glass windows would be lit up with crowds surging between the two crenellated gatehouses onto the planked forecourt lined with long-gone slot machines, a sea of faces swelling around the carriages of the wealthy and the cabs of the comfortably off. Now the building stood gloomily empty, the high iron-railed gates shut and topped by rolls of lethal-looking military barbed wire and signs on the railings warning:
WAR OFFICE – KEEP OUT TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
A heavy chain had been wrapped round both gates and secured with a padlock the size of a Scotsman’s sporran. It might not have presented much of a problem to an invading panzer division, but it certainly kept any vandals out and would have presented me with a problem if I had not been given my instructions. The padlock on a gate to the side of the right-hand gatehouse had been unlocked, with the shank pressed only slightly into the body so that I could easily slip it open.
Somebody had been busy with their oil can again for the gate swung open without a squeak. I passed through, leaving it fractionally ajar so that, if any of my men did need to follow, they wouldn’t be shredding themselves trying to clamber over the top, though the image of Sharkey impaling himself on top of the main gates was fleetingly pleasing.
The forecourt was deserted, the wind whipping the rain from the remnants of the pier into my face and stirring the sea into restless waves breaking invisibly onto the shingle ten yards beneath my feet.
The front door was open. Once I had skipped through it with Pooky holding my hand to see Aladdin. My parents never went to the panto, mainly because my mother found it unsettling, though she could not explain why, but also because my father thought it a waste of money. He had grown out of such things, he declared, oblivious to the fact that I had not.
Nine o’clock on the dot.
The foyer was a forlorn sight, the ticket office window closed with a sign hanging over the window declaring as much. Cobwebs were draped like dustsheets over hanging non-glittering chandeliers and the gold-painted scrolled mirrors fixed all around.
The floor and the long runner going down the middle of the foyer were carpeted in heavy dust. There were several scuffs in the dirt but no clear footprints. The double doors with their tarnished brass handles were closed but they pushed creakily open. Once liveried footmen had held the doors back while pretty usherettes in daringly short red dresses saw members of the audience to their seats.
Now the auditorium was filled, not with laughter, applause or cheers, but with the stench of decay. The claret velvet seats were mouldy and the gold paint peeling off their arms, springs sticking through some of the upholstery. The ceiling so gaily painted with trumpet-blowing cherubs, laurel crowns and shepherdesses was stained by water from the leaking roof – lead thieves had been on it years ago – with sections of plaster collapsed over the stalls and overfilling one of the upper boxes.
A lot of seats at the front were missing or tilted forward.
Most worrying of all was the smell of rotting wood and the way the floor felt spongy and sagged. The wind and sea sounded much louder than they should as I stepped carefully down that central aisle. I put on my torch and saw that the runner abruptly disappeared ahead of me. As I edged forward, the reason for the devastated front rows became obvious. The floor had caved in, creating a jagged-edged chasm some six to ten feet wide. Fifty feet below, the sea swelled and crashed against the barbed-wire-tangled seaweed-and-barnacle-covered posts that – I hoped – supported the derelict theatre. The air gusted up with sudden vigour and I stepped hastily back from the edge.
On the other side of the ditch were the tumbled remains of the orchestra pit and, beyond that, the raised stage. The safety curtain had been lowered, with the remnants of the original grand drapes at the front hanging raggedly at either side. I turned to look up at the balconies but from what I could see they were deserted.
‘Hello,’ I called, my voice curiously flat and dead, and I remembered hearing a leading lady complain once about the poor acoustics of the pavilion. There was a crash behind me and I spun back to see the safety curtain collapsing into billowing clouds of debris to expose a dust-fogged stage. The curtain toppled forward and fell, tumbling into what was left of the pit.
With a loud click the footlights went on and behind them was a drawing room scene, very Terence Rattigan – all chintz with potted palms – and I half-expected to see a maid appear to vacuum up the debris. She couldn’t have been doing her job properly for years. The figure that did stagger onto the stage from the right wing was not dressed in a servant’s outfit, however. She was all in black and, as my eyes became accustomed to the sudden blaze, I saw quite clearly that this was Lavender Wicks.
‘Please don’t kill me,’ she sobbed and sank to her knees.
97
THE INVISIBLE MAN
Lavender Wicks put out a hand to steady herself against a sofa. Her platinum hair was unclipped and hanging over the left side of her face.
‘Mrs Wicks,’ I shouted above the surging sea. ‘Are you hurt?’
Lavender hauled herself up and looked about in confusion.
‘Who is it?’ She squinted through the lights towards me.
‘It’s me,’ I called stupidly, then added, more informatively, ‘Inspector Church.’
‘Inspector?’ She made a peak of her hand to shield her eyes. ‘Can it really be you?’
‘Is anybody with you?’
‘Oh thank God.’
‘Where is the kidnapper?’ I put the bag down on a hinged seat that had fallen open as if the invisible man was sitting on it. If he was, he didn’t make a fuss.
‘I knew you would save me.’ She let go of the sofa and took a faltering step forward.
‘Don’t get too close to the edge,’ I warned. ‘It’s not safe.’
Lavender Wicks grabbed the back of an armchair as her knees buckled, but she managed to keep herself upright.
‘Have you paid the ransom? Are they letting me go?’
‘I’ve brought it. Who are they? Do you know where they are?’
‘Oh Betty,’ she cried and this did not seem a time to stand on my dignity over my rank. ‘I thought they were going to kill me. Is that really you? Come forward a little more where I can see you.’
I took a couple of cautious steps and saw a second figure to the back of the stage rising from the floor. I was just about to shout out a warning when I saw that it was Dodo, with her finger pointing to her nose in the way she thought meant shush. She was in a pretty, unseasonably summery frock and had a racquet in her right hand, as if she was going to bound across laughing lightly, Anyone for tennis? But Dodo’s expression was dead
ly serious as she crept towards Lavender, raising the racquet over her left shoulder.
‘Are you all right, Lavender?’ I called, hoping I didn’t sound as confused as I was.
‘Oh Betty,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s been awful. I thought I was going out of my mind. Thurston must have been frantic with worry. Was it him who paid the ransom?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Do you know where they are – your kidnappers?’ I looked about me anxiously.
‘I can’t see you very well.’ Lavender leaned towards me.
Dodo was almost behind her now.
‘I’m worried about the floor,’ I told her. ‘It’s rotten.’
Lavender reached behind her back.
‘Watch out, she’s got a blooming gun!’ Dodo yelled and, with a great flourish, whacked Lavender Wicks full on the temple with the side of the racquet, knocking her out cold.
98
THE LAYING OUT OF LAVENDER WICKS
Dodo dropped the racquet and caught Lavender Wicks as she fell, lowering her to the floor.
‘I told you she was the guilty one,’ she reminded me, pinching Lavender’s wrist.
‘For crying out loud, Constable Chivers,’ I bawled across at her. ‘She was the victim. The kidnapper is probably still in the building.’
A terrible idea was crystallising in my mind that I might be speaking to the kidnapper and murderer at that very moment. Was it possible that Drusilla, having allayed suspicions of being an accomplice to the murder of Fradigor Strynge, by her air of childish innocence, was trying the same trick again? Her ‘blooming gun’; her sprained ankle; the way she had clutched Ardom Dapper’s throat at the railway station; her lie about the train being late when the accountant, Skotter Heath Jackson, was murdered in his office; the mysterious woman at the Dunworthy saying ‘ouchy-wouchy’. So many loose ends suddenly intertwined into one line of evidence.
‘I am sorry, boss,’ Dodo crossed Lavender’s arms over her chest as if laying out a corpse, ‘but – without wishing to be as contrary as a cod – have you forgotten that I noticed her direct gaze?’
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