Blaze Away

by Bill James

  Ember had done the scepticism reaction to what she said, more or less by instinct. He would have discouraged anyone who floated ideas that might make a complicated situation more complicated. Alice Lamb had a badgering, unduly frank kind of approach to things, and some of those things could involve him. Well, already involved him. She’d done all that ‘I Spy’ rubbish and the stranded fucking whale. Ralph considered her brashness and lack of tact could be dangerous. He decided she’d better not have any more Kressmann’s although her balloon was empty. ‘What was she like, this woman?’ he asked.

  ‘When we read in the Press of private art collections getting pillaged, the report will almost always carry the cliché “well-organized”,’ she replied. ‘But of course well-organized. It’s not like stealing an apple from a greengrocer’s pavement stall, is it? The account will often say that there must have been a long spell of observation pre-strike. What the Peugeot woman seemed to be doing, Ralph, was one part of that “spell of observation” – getting and noting down all aspects of the building – doors, windows, especially, of course. Any ladders about? Dogs? And perhaps she tried to estimate how many people were around the house and grounds and where exactly they seemed to operate. This type of work is her speciality. A pathfinder. She’s young for it – twenties. Slim, squarish face, happy-looking, but that could be put on, couldn’t it, to back up her pretence at being simply a simple-minded excited visitor, simply delighted by the views? The job is a high skill, I should imagine. She’ll report back to associates. They’ll act, or not, on her say-so. It’s a responsibility.’

  ‘Act?’

  ‘Act to lift some of Jack’s art. Maybe all.’

  ‘Have you told him about Peugeot woman?’

  ‘Of course. Immediately we got back, still smelling of horse.’

  ‘And what response?’

  She glanced at her empty glass. That fitted the kind of character sketch of her Ralph had formed in his head. If she wanted a drink, another drink, she was the sort who’d more or less say she wanted another drink. Sod politeness and restraint. He poured for both of them. She took a tiny sip. Perhaps she just wanted the Armagnac at hand, reliably available. A weakness? ‘Helen had warned me,’ she said.

  ‘In what sense?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Warned me that Jack wouldn’t say or show what he thought of the news. That’s how he often is, apparently. There exist bits of his life she doesn’t get to know about – all kinds of hidden concerns for him to take care of. Something weird with the cop, Harpur, perhaps? He’s up at Darien not long ago and apparently looking at one of the pictures, but obviously not seeing what was actually there. If you ask me, he was getting a terrible vision of something awful that had happened to Jack. Helen’s friendly with Harpur’s girlfriend, Denise, but that’s no help, I gather.

  ‘Anyway, Helen was right about Jack’s attitude to this new info. We mentioned Peugeot woman, gave him the car reg in case he had ways of tracing it. “Thanks,” he said, “you’ve done remarkably well, Ma, Helen.” Like, “share top prize for good conduct at school”. So I said, “Remarkably well, how, Jack?”

  ‘“Really, remarkably well,” he replied, as if that explained everything.

  ‘So, I’m his mother, I don’t put up with such evasiveness from him, big as he might be now, and I say, “But what does it tell you, Jack?”

  ‘“What does what tell me?” he replies, if you can call it a reply.

  ‘And Helen says, “I think we’d better leave it there, Alice. Jack’s not going to elucidate.”

  ‘“Elucidate what?” Jack asks.’

  ‘There are a lot of conversations like that around here,’ Ralph replied.

  ‘It wasn’t totally negative: Jack goes out into the grounds and looks up at the spot where we’d seen the woman, as though trying to work out what she might have spied. Then he comes back and starts talking about something else altogether, like us up the hill with the wind farms and Van Gogh. And Helen goes along with his useless chit-chat, as though she’s seen Jack choke off a topic many times before and realized this was as far as we were going to get.’

  ‘Yes, lots of conversations are ended or switched around here,’ Ralph said.

  ‘And you’re content with that?’ she said.

  ‘It’s how it is. You’d get used to it.’

  ‘No, I damn well wouldn’t,’ she replied.

  As she spoke about Jack’s mysteriousness and refusal to behave like an obedient son and cough the lot to his mummy, who’d crossed the Atlantic just to be with him, Ember felt a kind of pity for her. She wanted to help her lad, had tried to help him, but he’d brushed her and Helen off with a formal, blank, ‘Thanks, you’ve done remarkably well.’ And, as anyone might have followed up if given that treatment, she’d come back with something like, ‘OK, we’ve done remarkably well. Tell me exactly how, would you, please?’ His answer, though, had amounted to, ‘Fuck off, Mummy, dear.’

  Some words of hers came back to Ralph from a telephone conversation a while ago. The Kressmann could sometime sharpen his recall, as now, and sometimes blot it out totally. She’d spoken then like an American moll rather than a mixed-nationality ma. The Monty had been mentioned, and she’d suggested it was the kind of club where ‘sotto voce’, illicit, illegal gun deals could take place. Ralph hadn’t bothered to contradict her because the remark seemed too ludicrous, so melodramatic. He’d wondered if, possibly, she came from a San Francisco district where clubs had that kind of reputation. He’d decided she probably didn’t know, or had forgotten, about the great tradition of English clubs such as Boodle’s or The Athenaeum, a tradition Ralph intended to make The Monty a worthy part of in due course, possibly with the help of art.

  He still felt like that, but today, in the club with her, he had the sudden conviction that she continued to think The Monty a source of firearms, and she was here to get one. Alice Lamb had come to accept that Helen, the sweet, bright girl who saw Jack virtually every day, was more likely to know his present ways than Alice did. The mother era was over. And Helen had pronounced from her special insights that Jack would not ‘elucidate’. But, no, the mother era was not over. Only half over. She retained those feelings towards Jack, but in adulthood Jack’s feelings towards her had naturally changed. Something like that happened in all families. Never mind: Alice was determined to do everything possible to look after him. She couldn’t tell whether Jack would prepare to counter the possible threat from Peugeot woman and her mates, whoever and wherever they were. Accordingly, Alice had come searching for a piece to protect her boy, Jack, Helen, herself and the art, but above all her boy. How mothers were.

  She took quite a pull this time at the Kressmann. ‘I expect you can guess why I’ve come here, Ralph,’ she said.

  ‘I feel flattered,’ he replied. ‘You wanted to talk over a problem – as you perceive it – yes, talk over a perceived problem with someone who knows the general scene, but can bring impartiality and balance.’

  ‘To hell with “talk over”. To hell with “impartiality and balance”. I want a gun.’

  ‘A gun?’ Ralph exclaimed, his voice quite believably taut with shock. ‘You want a gun?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After that high-security session with Jack in the launderette, Harpur sent for the personnel records of all staff at the Silver Bells And Cockleshells nursery. The owner and everyone who worked there had been deep-vetted before being allowed contact with children; very deep-vetted, following a crop of scandals nationwide. Maybe it was media publicity for these cases that activated the two Oxfam vigilante slobs: Albert with his baseball bat, and Vernon. They’d prevented him from talking to the woman who yelled, from the tree house, to the Peugeot driver to come back. Harpur considered that anyone who yelled from a tree house might be worth talking to, but especially this woman.

  He could remember fairly accurately the start of the bellowed message. Two children were standing near her. ‘Come back, oh, do come back,’ the woman had cried. ‘Leav
e not in such circs, please.’ He’d thought of that summons as heartfelt, urgent, poignant. Which ‘circs’ did she have in mind? Would they justify the quaint syntax of ‘leave not’? But he’d had no time then to investigate because he’d needed to get into the Peugeot’s slipstream – hopelessly, uselessly, as it turned out: a conversation instead with the Georgian terrace woman who yearned to shed her sarong, preferably with a young electrician, but Harpur would have been OK.

  Among the vetting papers he found the dossier he wanted. A photograph was captioned ‘Fern Jocelyn Beatty, aged fifty-three’ and gave an address in Daynton Gardens. Harpur had been too far away from the tree house for him to make out detail of her appearance, but the photograph confirmed his impression of her: Rounded, chubby features, grey hair inexpertly cut, a burly neck and wide shoulders. She was in her fourth year at Silver Bells. Before that she’d been employed as a local-authority carer and had a five-year spell in another children’s nursery. The vetting had produced nothing dubious. The earlier nursery described her conduct as ‘exemplary, if sometimes slightly combative’. She was married, with a grown-up daughter who had moved out.

  The Beatty address was not far from Silver Bells And Cockleshells, and Harpur drove over and decided he would drop in at the Oxfam shop en route. He might be able to get a brief giggle at Albert and Vernon, who possibly still sported damage brought by Iles responding briskly to their call. Harpur hoped they’d be on duty.

  He parked at what he’d come to think of as his personal timed spot and went into the shop. They were both there behind the counter, Albert not at all facially marked but with what looked like a wrist in plaster. He must have tried to break his fall with one hand when Iles crash-tackled him. Vernon had bruising on one cheek near his ear, a reminder of the ACC’s punch. ‘Well, lads,’ Harpur said, ‘you’re a worthy couple. No malingering, despite injuries.’ He studied the used-book shelves. ‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘would you believe this, not one copy of The Practical Guide To Pederasty?’ He left the shop muttering disappointed curses and drove to Daynton Gardens. It was a Saturday and the nursery would be closed. Fern might be at home.

  She answered the door when Harpur rang the bell. ‘Harpur,’ he said. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent. Routine. Nothing to get anxious about. We do a vetting update after a four-year period in any post. New legislation owing to some of the bad instances we’ve all heard about and deplored, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’

  ‘Absolutely. And there’s an incident I’d like to discuss, which may or may not be of relevance. Best deal with it, though. Clear it out of the way if it is something isolated and harmless.’

  ‘Incident?’

  ‘An incident not actually within the nursery; more a kind of street incident.’

  ‘Will you come in?’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She took Harpur to a pleasant sitting room. It was very simply furnished, the floorboards sanded and varnished, no carpet, two big settees in leather and two matching armchairs. Three abstract paintings in broad white frames hung on the walls, not an artistic style Harpur normally went for, but he found the bright coloured blobs, wisps, and rectangles very nicely ordered here. Fern might have her strange mouthy moments and spells of combativeness, as the dossier alleged, but somebody in the house had taste.

  A man of about Fern’s age, heavily built, lantern jawed, was in one of the armchairs reading the New Statesman, a Leftish political magazine. He stood to shake hands with Harpur and spoke his name, ‘Leonard Beatty.’

  Harpur said: ‘Colin Harpur.’ He took the other armchair.

  Fern sat opposite on a settee. ‘My husband, Leonard,’ she said. ‘This is Mr Harpur, a police officer, Len. About the nursery.’

  ‘Private?’ Leonard said.

  ‘A formality, that’s all,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Mr Harpur says an incident,’ Fern said.

  ‘Could mean nothing or anything,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Right,’ Leonard said.

  Harpur saw that Beatty meant to stay. He sat down again and put the magazine on the floor. Harpur guessed Beatty wanted to hear and remember what was said: no police interview trickery. When he’d asked, ‘Private?’ he’d seemed about to leave her and Harpur alone. That was before Fern announced ‘an incident’, though. He’d obviously grown wary, suspicious. Perhaps he knew of Fern’s tendency to sound off, maybe sound off recklessly. Leonard would watch and witness, maybe make her apply the brakes now and then. Leonard was a New Statesman reader.

  Harpur had made some basic notes from Fern’s file and went over these with her now, as if they needed checking and possible revising. He had also written down his recollection of the full Fern statement from the tree house to the Peugeot woman.

  ‘What incident, exactly?’ Beatty asked. He might have recognized that the run-through of elementary dossier information was a cover only, an excuse for calling. Leonard was a New Statesman reader.

  ‘Yes,’ Harpur replied. ‘One of our people, a girl called Margot, happened to be in Brendan Street at the time – had been dropping some unwanted clothes off at the charity shop. There’s an Oxfam outlet near the nursery, you know.’

  ‘One of whose people?’ Leonard asked.

  ‘As she emerged on to the pavement she heard a woman calling out in a rather unusual way,’ Harpur replied. ‘She looked about and saw that the shouted requests were coming from a woman standing with two children in the nursery’s tree house. She appeared to be addressing – at a distance – a younger woman, who was about to get into a green Peugeot saloon car and who stood for a while listening and then waved and left. Margot said the message from the tree house had what she called “a plaintive undertow”.’ Harpur read from his notes. ‘She memorized the words as something like this: “Come back, oh, do. Leave not in such circs, please.”’ Harpur looked up from his papers. ‘Margot was certain about having that last sentence verbatim because of the strange “leave not” and the shortening – “circs”.’

  ‘You think this woman in the tree house, broadcasting, was Fern?’ Beatty asked Harpur. ‘You called out that, Fern?’ Leonard asked. ‘But who to?’

  ‘Sometimes I get very frustrated at the nursery,’ she said.

  ‘That “leave not” – it could be adapted from a Shakespeare construction with the imperative, couldn’t it?’ Leonard said.

  ‘Could it?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘But sort of reversed,’ Leonard said. ‘Lady Macbeth wanting to clear a room where Banquo’s ghost has, in fact, been messing up the circs, says, “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go!”’

  Harpur went back to his notes. ‘The tree house shouting continued: “Oh, please. I’ve a lot to say. We didn’t speak, did we? Do, do return. So much to comment on about him and various matters. Yes, re him and various matters.”’

  ‘Would you say “re”, Fern?’ Leonard asked.

  Harpur had thought ‘re’ the kind of term someone called Margot might use. He said: ‘It could have been “about”, I suppose. Margot didn’t claim perfect recall.’ He read again: ‘“Yes, re him and various matters. Who are you? Who really are you? Is there truly a prospective Christine?”’

  ‘You said all this, Fern? Has Harpur got it right? Who’s “him”? Who’s Christine?’

  ‘Margot’s pretty sure that’s what she said,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘A prospective Christine?’ Beatty said. ‘What the hell does it mean, Fern?’

  She paused for a while, staring at one of the abstracts, as if that were the topic. Then she shrugged. She’d decided to talk. ‘Well, yes, there’d been some trouble at the nursery,’ she said. ‘Why I spoke of frustration. But very minor trouble. Something not worth boring you with at the time, Len.’

  ‘I’d have preferred to hear,’ Beatty said.

  Harpur had the notion that Fern might fall into strange outbursts and then come to regret them, feel ashamed of them, keep quiet about them. The spells of ‘combativen
ess’ might produce one of these outbursts. So might ‘frustration’.

  ‘Well, of course, everyone’s very sensitive to things about children’s nurseries these days, so Margot mentions this incident to me as baffling,’ Harpur said. ‘I sent for the vetting documents, and Margot was able to identify Fern from the photograph there.’ Harpur refolded his papers. Nice work, Margot. ‘And so I opted to look into the situation myself. Why I’m here. Just to make sure everything is OK.’

  ‘Is everything OK, Fern?’ Len sounded angry, as if fiercely offended that Harpur should know more about his wife’s behaviour at work than he did. Harpur and Margot that would be. Leonard probably resented that he’d been put at a disadvantage with police. Len read the New Statesman.

  ‘The “him”?’ Fern said. ‘That’s a man called Loam who comes to the nursery now and then and something goes on between him and Judy Timmins.’

  ‘What goes on?’ Beatty asked.

  ‘Something very private,’ Fern said.

  ‘Goes on where?’ Beatty replied.

  ‘In her office,’ Fern said.

  ‘Judy Timmins is the proprietor, yes?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Loam’s family are supposed to be something special,’ Fern said. ‘Tea.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leonard said. ‘Well-known. Very big-time capitalist merchants in the past.’

  ‘This is taking place within metres of the children,’ Fern said.

  ‘What is?’ Beatty asked.

  ‘But today there was some sort of quarrel, and he stamped off in a rage. I was afraid this might upset a very charming young woman who was in the nursery at the time about bringing a child there. She left, probably puzzled by it all, perhaps unfavourably impressed by Silver Bells.’