‘How do I know?’ she said. She nearly sniggered, then thought better of it. ‘I’m not in the habit of ringing people like the Sanders, my husband wouldn’t like it. He’s very strong, my husband is, and works for Cashabout, the security firm.’
‘I don’t care about your husband or where he works,’ I said. ‘Give me the local directory.’ I drifted through the S’s. The Sanders were listed OK, so I dialled them.
‘My husband, he works right through the night sometimes,’ said the receptionist.
I got the ringing tone and said to her: ‘Be quiet, will you?’ The phone answered the other end and a woman’s voice screamed down it: ‘Well?’
‘Dick Sanders there?’
‘No, he’s not in!’
‘He lives with you, doesn’t he? You’re his mother?’
‘Yes I am, no I’m not, yes he lives here, no he doesn’t, who the hell are you?’
‘I’m his uncle Bill, tell him.’
‘My Dick’s not got no uncle Bill.’ Then she got it and screamed backwards from the phone: ‘My life, it’s only the old bill on the fucking phone.’
I said: ‘I’ll be round to see him today, this afternoon most like, make sure he’s in, ma.’
‘More of you interfering bastards!’.
I rang off. I made a note of the Sanders address. The receptionist said: ‘You like quick results, you do, don’t you?’
‘They’re the best kind,’ I said. ‘Do you know a house called Thornhill Court?’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Did the Mardys come into this hotel?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Did you see Mrs Mardy about with a scarf or veil round her face?’
Her own face went deaf and blind. ‘No.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I see there’s no point my pressing it. You just take my messages for me, all right?’
‘This isn’t the Policeman’s Arms.’
‘Just do as I say,’ I said, ‘and you’ll spare yourself a big pain in the fundament.’ I walked out of the hotel and into the morning. The weather was sharp and overcast with ice in the gutters. I walked up what was left of the old high street past the arch of the coaching-inn, now a boutique on one side and a fast food on the other – now, I guessed, the only carriages to be seen there were on veteran car club day, the only horses when young bank managers came down holding their children’s bridle on a Saturday morning. But why be bitter about progress? I walked past cottages converted into offices, with soft-looking men and breastless little brides hard at it on their IBMs behind bow windows. I looked at the business signs – Walter Baddeley, Estate Agents, HM Inspector of Taxes, a Listening Bank, W. Baddeley & Sons, Funeral Directors, until I got to the Jolly Sailor. His picture looked just as bucolic and amused as it had done last night while it swung benevolently over the five whites chasing the Asian, except that by morning light his smile and chubby cheeks looked improbable and hung-over. I went through into the public bar; the place was empty except for an African who was sweeping up.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He let that drift.
‘Place is open, is it?’
‘Look, man, you’re in it, ain’t you?’
‘I mean open for a drink.’
‘Don’t know about that, I’ll have to see.’
‘That’s not difficult,’ I said, ‘try turning round, the clock’s right behind you.’
‘So am I,’ said a rich voice, ‘and I’m the governor here.’
But he said the word governor as though he bad beeen at some pains to learn it.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Well, are we fit for a drink then?’
‘You’re starting early.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘What I’m asking you is, are you serving? It’s gone half past ten.’
He looked at me carefully to see if I was sober; I looked at him carefully to see if he was a villain. He wasn’t. He was one of those people who try to turn a pub into a Battle of Britain officers’ mess, though far too young ever to have known one. I could practically hear him running my accent through his mind; with my grammar school background I don’t suppose I scored high.
‘Yes, very well,’ he said at last, ‘what’ll it be then?’
‘I’ll have a pint of Kronenbourg.’
‘You ought to try some of our real ale.’
‘I prefer the Kronenbourg,’ I said, ‘we’re used to each other.’
The governor pulled the pint and said: ‘Busy day ahead of you?’
‘Very,’ I said. ‘I won’t outstay my welcome.’
‘Commercial, are you?’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘More of a surveyor really.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ he said, struggling not to yawn, ‘that’ll be one pound twelve.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, giving him the money, ‘do you own this place or are you just the tenant?’
‘I’m the tenant,’ he said, ‘not just the tenant.’ He gave me my change and looked my tired clothes up and down. ‘And tell me something,’ he added. ‘Do you go round like this every day, asking people you don’t know personal questions?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all part of being a surveyor.’
‘I thought they worked with theodolites. Is it about the new road at Hope Street corner?’
‘No it isn’t,’ I said, ‘and some surveyors just use notebooks. I’m one of them.’
‘Well, to put this bluntly,’ he said, ‘I’m accustomed to receiving gentlemen in this bar, everyone else goes next door. And the mark of a gentleman is that he doesn’t stick his nose in where he isn’t known.’
‘You’re full of mad dreams,’ I said, ‘but cherish them if you like. Speaking for myself, I’m certainly no gentleman, but I ask a great many questions and what’s more, I usually get answers to them.’
‘You’ll find I’m the exception,’ he said in his public school tone, turning red.
‘I won’t, you know,’ I said. I identified myself. ‘I’m a police officer; can’t you spot them yet?’
He pulled out a handkerchief and made a moist noise into it. A fragile old man with a stick, pork-pie hat and suede shoes slipped past us saying: ‘Good morning, Captain Goodinge, a rather dreary day again.’ He sat down at a cane table under a repro sporting print, dropped his stick on the floor together with an empty shopping bag and said to the African: ‘My usual, please.’
‘What’s that, man?’
‘You know perfectly well, Selim,’ said the governor. ‘The colonel’s is a double vodka, dry martini, two drops of angostura and plenty of ice.’ He turned to me and said: ‘Of course I’d no idea you were from the police.’
‘I try to foster that idea,’ I said. I added: ‘Surveyor. I tried to mark your card. Quaint, that, I thought – but you didn’t catch on. I don’t think you’ve been in this business long. What are you? Trainee manager?’
He turned red and said yes.
‘Always get on good terms with the law if you keep a pub,’ I said. ‘That’s iron rule number one.’
‘You’re not local,’ he said.
‘Nor are you.’
‘You’re down from London, then?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’ve come down over the Mardys, it’s to do with his wife’s disappearance.’ I made no attempt to keep my voice down and the governor, the old man in the corner, the African, the whole pub were all suddenly very still. I said to Goodinge: ‘Did you know Mrs Mardy personally at all?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said quickly. ‘The wife and I used to go up to their concerts at the house, of course. Weird place, but you had a lovely evening.’
‘Many people in Thornhill went up for the concerts to listen to Madam Mardy sing,’ said the old man. He spoke slowly, and his face above the regimental tie and the expensive tweed jacket had the purplish look of a cardiac case. ‘You’d leave feeling full of song, and different somehow.’
I said to the governor: ‘H
ave any of your regulars seen her around since last August? You yourself, or your wife? You, Colonel?’
They said no.
‘And how was she, how did she strike you both the last time you did see her?’
‘That was back in last June for me,’ said the governor, ‘and she looked dreadful, terribly ill. She’d whisper past you in the street with that veil round her face, and her hand to the veil, face turned away from you to the wall by the pavement side, and she’d got so thin … oh, good morning, Major,’ he added to a grey, straight-haired man who strode through with a grey flannel dog on a chain. ‘The usual? Straight away.’ Filling the major’s order at the optic he said with his back to me: ‘Yes, Madam Mardy was a remarkable woman all right.’
‘Was,’ I said. ‘Everyone keeps saying was.’
‘What else can you say of her when she’s been gone six months like that?’ said the governor. He set the major’s drink on a tray and picked it up. ‘Nobody’s saying we weren’t all worried, mind.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘my people are worried too and so here I am come down to worry about the worry.’
The governor went into the other bar with the major’s drink and the old man said: ‘Will you get far, do you think?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll go the distance, but only slowly on my own – useful help, like information, will speed everything up.’
‘Yes, but you know how things are,’ said the governor, returning, ‘it’s not for us to pry into the affairs of other people.’
‘It’s the old story of the road accident,’ I said. ‘Everyone drives on saying it’s none of our business, while the victim dies in the hedge.’
‘Don’t talk like that, Sergeant,’ said the old man sharply. ‘Even if we hadn’t liked the Mardys as much as we do we’d still have reacted.’
‘The people who should have reacted,’ I said, ‘were the local police. Has either of you any idea why they didn’t?’
‘Ah well, I—’ said the governor, and stopped.
‘You, Colonel?’
‘Where there’s no proof,’ said the old man, ‘I’d rather say nothing.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Now you say that people in Thornhill generally liked the Mardys. When you say the Mardys, does that include Dr Mardy?’
‘Well of course,’ said the colonel, ‘poor William Mardy.’
‘Why poor?’
‘There’s a man who’ll come in presently could explain that to you if he wanted,’ said the colonel, and the governor said: ‘Now easy, sir,’ but the colonel said: ‘We are talking to a police officer; it is our duty to give him all the help we can; he is here to investigate this matter.’
‘Perhaps you would point this individual out,’ I said, and the colonel said yes, I will. He added: ‘William Mardy is a very troubled man,’ and I replied: ‘I know, I’ve met him.’
‘Time ran on,’ said the old man, ‘and the local police did nothing, so that in the end a group of us signed a petition and I—’
‘Colonel Newington got up the petition,’ said the governor, ‘and went to see the Chief Constable with it.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I wondered who had.’
‘The colonel used to be a magistrate until he retired.’
The old man ordered us a round. There were just the three of us in the little bar; it was early yet. A fire of beech logs spat sharply in the grate and a flight of crows wheeled in the grey sky outside, making for the naked fields. The old man downed his drink and crooked his finger for Goodinge to bring another.
‘It’s a question of seeing men die,’ he said presently, ‘and of feeling responsible; it’s also a matter of running the same risk, otherwise you can’t know what the danger means, and that’s how I felt over Marianne, watching her fade and the rest of us powerless to intervene.’
I understood all right.
He said: ‘I was on Dunkirk beaches in June 1940 with the Royal Artillery, 31st Light AA Battery. We were trying to hold off the Luftwaffe; we were some of the last to get away. The French did well,’ he muttered into his glass, ‘very well. We all did well but we were defeated, what else can you say? I was just a lieutenant then, but most of the senior officers were dead, and when at last we got orders to abandon our guns it was up to people like me to make sure that everyone got properly organized on the beach. I’d had no experience of combat anything like that before, so I remember thinking the whole time that I had to look as if I knew what I was doing, which mostly consisted of standing upright among the bullets, keeping calm and arranging the queues that were waiting to wade out to sea where the boats were. What a bloody nightmare. I wanted to dig down into the sand the whole time, but was even more afraid of being thought a coward, of being court-martialled and unable to face my family if I ever got home.’ He had turned grey, and wasn’t really talking to us at all. ‘A great many dead,’ he whispered, ‘a terrible lot, French and ours. But there was no panic hardly, no mutiny – I shall never know why not. Everyone behaved so well; they should all have been decorated, every man of them. Those bloody fighters shot them wholesale in the sea; I remember part of the water turning pink by the shore. Then I had the language problem too – try evacuating men under fire in schoolboy French. Orderly retreat, orderly retreat kept coming through from Gort at GHQ. They didn’t know what they were asking for, and the staff-work had become appalling under the pressure, a shambles. At the very end I was hit in the right foot and had to sit down. There was another man beside me; he’d been shot in the leg. We managed to get to the shelter of a dune and lay back to rest for a time in deep sand. I tried to dress his wound, but he was losing blood at a dreadful rate. I kept telling him he would be all right, and in the end he rested his head on my lap for a time. I put my hands and cap over his face to protect him against the sun, then there was a great explosion and his chest was gone, there were only his head and legs left. I was red all over from him and my own boot was full of blood. I don’t remember after that, but it seems they came for me and took his head out of my hands and got me to the boats on a man’s back who told me later on that I was reciting the Nunc Dimittis. Of course I didn’t remember that either.’
‘Don’t take on, Colonel,’ said Goodinge, ‘it’s forty-five years ago now, all that.’
‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘It’s as if it were yesterday to me and I should add that I was terribly in love at that time. Her name was Claire, lovely Claire from High Court. She was the only girl I ever knew who could jump the great fence at Toll Shaws; she did it on Thistle, her father’s big roan, gay as a spark, looking back at me with a grin while the other men fidgeted on their hacks, biting their nails – they had told her not to be so silly as to try it. That same night at the hunt ball at Castle Carey we danced together all night, on fire with love for each other, with eyes for no one, till dawn came up to greet us with breakfast and more champagne. There were candles everywhere and much punch and music; she was an image like a dream, her long skirts collected behind her in a bustle, a pink top, an onyx against her breast on a silver chain. Blonde, she was, and straight as a little stick: it was in thirty-eight.’
‘Another drink, Colonel?’ Goodinge said.
‘Yes,’ said the colonel, holding out his glass, ‘and for the sergeant here, thank you, Goodinge.’
‘And tell me,’ I said, ‘did you marry Claire? Claire from High Court?’
‘No,’ he said steadily. ‘I didn’t.’ He lit a cigarette in the flame that Goodinge held for him. ‘She was killed, machine-gunned by a fighter in Plymouth in August 1940, on the steps of the hospital where she was working as a nurse.’
‘And did you never marry?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Some of us can only love once.’ He looked at his cigarette for a minute and said: ‘Have you ever been shot at?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and hit too. In the arm, bloody painful. I took a knife too, once.’
‘Have you ever been married?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’d ra
ther not talk about it. What I’d rather talk about is a young man I want to interview called Dick Sanders.’
Goodinge murmured to me: ‘Go easy. The old gentleman will have had a few before he came in, a skinful; he often drinks all night.’
‘That’s a lie, Goodinge,’ said the old man in his even voice. ‘I’m not as deaf as you think I am. The fact is that I drink all night and all day. I drink to the eyes of a malt so clear that I’ll leave her a widow; but she’ll remarry, I’ve no doubt.’ He added: ‘Yes, I employed Dick Sanders, but not for long.’
‘Why was that?’
The colonel made a savage gesture at the table in front of him and his glass fell on the floor. ‘Because he was a spy and a thief. In the end I put a twenty-pound note where I knew he’d go looking for it, then watched and caught him with his hand in the drawer and the money in it.’
‘And what did you do about it?’
‘I had a glass of whisky in my hand and I threw it in his face, and that was the end of that.’
‘And did he go to the Mardys after that?’
‘Immediately after. I told William not to employ him, but he did so just the same.’
‘That was last year?’
‘January last year.’
‘Can you tell me any more?’
‘I could tell you lots of things,’ said the colonel. ‘I could tell you about treachery; I could tell you about people who come in here every day that stain the dead, of words that give a mouth the expression of dishonour as it speaks them, of eyes sly as money over the lip of a pint, the pupils almond as a cat’s, you’ll find them.’
A man in a black suit went by into the other bar and Newington pointed at him and said: ‘Him! Look at him!’
‘That’s Baddeley, the estate agent,’ Goodinge muttered to me, ‘one of the main people in Thornhill, there’s a rumour he’s going to run for mayor.’
‘Nothing known?’
‘What?’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘it’s a police phrase.’
‘Let the colonel off,’ Goodinge whispered, ‘he’s had enough. I’ll ring for his taxi.’
The colonel said blindly to the wall: ‘Let me alone, Goodinge, it isn’t lunchtime yet.’ He said to Goodinge: ‘Be a good fellow and take me to the loo.’ Goodinge came round the bar, the colonel took his arm and they went off together.
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 8
