by Dick Francis
Mavis gave me a flirting smile and disappeared.
‘Now, sir, can I help you?’ She was polite enough, but not the type to gossip about her employers.
‘Er—can we have afternoon tea here?’ I asked.
She glanced at the clock. ‘It’s a little late for tea, but go along into the lounge and the waiter will attend to you.’
Kate eyed the resulting fishpaste sandwiches with disfavour. ‘This is one of the hazards of detecting, I suppose,’ she said, taking a tentative bite. ‘What did you find out about what?’
I said I was not altogether sure, but that I was interested in anything that had even the remotest connection with the yellow shield taxis or with Bill Davidson, and Clifford Tudor was connected in the most commonplace way with both.
‘Nothing in it, I shouldn’t think,’ said Kate, finishing the sandwich but refusing another.
I sighed. ‘I don’t think so, either,’ I said.
‘What next, then?’
‘If I could find out who owns the yellow shield taxis…’
‘Let’s ring them up and ask,’ said Kate, standing up. She led the way to the telephone and looked up the number in the directory.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I’ll say I have a complaint to make and I want to write directly to the owner about it.’
She got through to the taxi office and gave a tremendous performance, demanding the names and addresses of the owners, managers and the company’s solicitors. Finally, she put down the receiver and looked at me disgustedly.
‘They wouldn’t tell me a single thing,’ she said. ‘He was a really patient man, I must say. He didn’t get ruffled when I was really quite rude to him. But all he would say was, “Please write to us with the details of your complaint and we will look into it fully.” He said it was not the company’s policy to disclose the names of its owners and he had no authority to do it. He wouldn’t budge an inch.’
‘Never mind. It was a darned good try. I didn’t really think they would tell you. But it gives me an idea…’
I rang up the Maidenhead police station and asked for Inspector Lodge. He was off duty, I was told. Would I care to leave a message? I would.
I said, ‘This is Alan York speaking. Will you please ask Inspector Lodge if he can find out who owns or controls the Marconicar radio taxi cabs in Brighton? He will know what it is about.’
The voice in Maidenhead said he would give Inspector Lodge the message in the morning, but could not undertake to confirm that Inspector Lodge would institute the requested enquiries. Nice official jargon. I thanked him and rang off.
Kate was standing close to me in the telephone box. She was wearing a delicate flowery scent, so faint that it was little more than a quiver in the air. I kissed her, gently. Her lips were soft and dry and sweet. She put her hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes, and smiled. I kissed her again.
A man opened the door of the telephone box. He laughed when he saw us. ‘I’m so sorry… I want to telephone…’ We stepped out of the box in confusion.
I looked at my watch. It was nearly half-past six.
‘What time does Aunt Deb expect us back?’ I asked.
‘Dinner is at eight. We’ve got until then,’ said Kate. ‘Let’s walk through the Lanes and look at the antique shops.’
We went slowly down the back pathways of Brighton, pausing before each brightly lit window to admire the contents. And stopping, too, in one or two corners in the growing dusk, to continue where we had left off in the telephone box. Kate’s kisses were sweet and virginal. She was unpractised in love, and though her body trembled once or twice in my arms, there was no passion, no hunger in her response.
At the end of one of the Lanes, while we were discussing whether to go any further, some lights were suddenly switched on behind us. We turned round. The licensee of the Blue Duck was opening his doors for the evening. It looked a cosy place.
‘How about a snifter before we go back?’ I suggested.
‘Lovely,’ said Kate. And in this casual inconsequential way we made the most decisive move in our afternoon’s sleuthing.
We went into the Blue Duck.
NINE
The bar was covered with a big sheet of gleaming copper. The beer handles shone. The glasses sparkled. It was a clean, friendly little room with warm lighting and original oils of fishing villages round the walls.
Kate and I leaned on the bar and discussed sherries with the innkeeper. He was a military-looking man of about fifty with a bristly moustache waxed at the ends. I put him down as a retired sergeant-major. But he knew his stuff, and the sherry he recommended to us was excellent. We were his first customers, and we stood chatting to him. He had the friendly manner of all good innkeepers, but underlying this I saw a definite wariness. It was like the nostril cocked for danger in a springbok; uneasy, even when all appeared safe. But I didn’t pay much attention, for his troubles, I thought erroneously, had nothing to do with me.
Another man and a girl came in, and Kate and I turned to take our drinks over to one of the small scattered tables. As we did so she stumbled, knocked her glass against the edge of the bar and broke it. A jagged edge cut her hand, and it began to bleed freely.
The innkeeper called his wife, a thin, small woman with bleached hair. She saw the blood welling out of Kate’s hand, and exclaimed with concern, ‘Come and put it under the cold tap. That’ll stop the bleeding. Mind you don’t get it on your nice coat.’
She opened a hatch in the bar to let us through, and led us into her kitchen, which was as spotless as the bar. On a table at one side were slices of bread, butter, cooked meats and chopped salads. We had interrupted the innkeeper’s wife in making sandwiches for the evening’s customers. She went across to the sink, turned on the tap, and beckoned to Kate to put her hand in the running water. I stood just inside the kitchen door looking round me.
‘I’m so sorry to be giving you all this trouble,’ said Kate, as the blood dripped into the sink. ‘It really isn’t a very bad cut. There just seems to be an awful lot of gore coming out of it.’
‘It’s no trouble at all, dear,’ said the innkeeper’s wife. ‘I’ll find you a bandage.’ She opened a dresser drawer to look for one, giving Kate a reassuring smile.
I started to walk over from the doorway to take a closer look at the damage. Instantly there was a deadly menacing snarl, and a black alsatian dog emerged from a box beside the refrigerator. His yellow eyes were fixed on me, his mouth was slightly open with the top lip drawn back, and the razor-sharp teeth were parted. There was a collar round his neck, but he was not chained up. Another snarl rumbled deep in his throat.
I stood stock still in the centre of the kitchen.
The innkeeper’s wife took a heavy stick from beside the dresser and went over to the dog. She seemed flustered.
‘Lie down, Prince. Lie down.’ She pointed with the stick to the box. The dog, after a second’s hesitation, stepped back into it and sat erect, still looking at me with the utmost hostility. I didn’t move.
‘I’m very sorry, sir. He doesn’t like strange men. He’s a very good guard dog, you see. He won’t hurt you now, not while I’m here.’ And she laid the stick on the dresser, and went over to Kate with cotton wool, disinfectant, and a bandage.
I took a step towards Kate. Muscles rippled along the dog’s back, but he stayed in his box. I finished the journey to the sink. The bleeding had almost stopped, and, as Kate said, it was not a bad cut. The innkeeper’s wife dabbed it with cotton wool soaked in disinfectant, dried it, and wound on a length of white gauze bandage.
I leaned against the draining board, looking at the dog and the heavy stick, and remembering the underlying edginess of the innkeeper. They added up to just one thing.
Protection.
Protection against what? Protection against Protection, said my brain, dutifully, in a refrain. Someone had been trying the Protection racket on mine host. Pay up or we smash up your pub… or you . . or your wife.
But this particular innkeeper, whether or not I was right about his sergeant-major past, looked tough enough to defy that sort of bullying. The collectors of Protection had been met, or were to be met, by an authentically lethal alsatian. They were likely to need protection themselves.
The innkeeper put his head round the door.
‘All right?’ he said.
‘It’s fine, thank you very much,’ said Kate.
‘I’ve been admiring your dog,’ I said.
The innkeeper took a step into the room. Prince turned his head away from me for the first time and looked at his master.
‘He’s a fine fellow,’ he agreed.
Suddenly out of nowhere there floated into my mind a peach of an idea. There could not, after all, be too many gangs in Brighton, and I had wondered several times why a taxi line should employ thugs and fight pitched battles. So I said, with a regrettable lack of caution, ‘Marconicars.’
The innkeeper’s professionally friendly smile vanished, and he suddenly looked at me with appalling, vivid hate. He picked the heavy stick off the dresser and raised it to hit me. The dog was out of his box in one fluid stride, crouching ready to spring, with his ears flat and his teeth bared. I had struck oil with a vengeance.
Kate came to the rescue. She stepped to my side and said, without the slightest trace of alarm, ‘For heaven’s sake don’t hit him too hard because Aunt Deb is expecting us for roast lamb and the odd potato within half an hour or so and she is very strict about us being back on the dot.’
This surprising drivel made the innkeeper hesitate long enough for me to say ‘I don’t belong to the Marconicars. I’m against them. Do be a good chap and put that stick down, and tell Prince his fangs are not required.’
The innkeeper lowered the stick, but he left Prince where he was, on guard four feet in front of me.
Kate said to me, ‘Whatever have we walked into?’ The bandage was trailing from her hand, and the blood was beginning to ooze through. She wound up the rest of the bandage unconcernedly and tucked in the end.
‘Protection, I think?’ I said to the innkeeper. ‘It was just a wild guess, about the taxis. I’d worked out why you need such an effective guard dog, and I’ve been thinking about taxi-drivers for days. The two things just clicked, that’s all.’
‘Some of the Marconicar taxi-drivers beat him up a bit a week ago,’ said Kate conversationally to the innkeeper’s wife. ‘So you can’t expect him to be quite sane on the subject.’
The innkeeper gave us both a long look. Then he went to his dog and put his hand round its neck and fondled it under its chin. The wicked yellow eyes closed, the lips relaxed over the sharp teeth, and the dog leaned against his master’s leg in devotion. The innkeeper patted its rump, and sent it back to its box.
‘A good dog, Prince,’ he said, with a touch of irony. ‘Well now, we can’t leave the bar unattended. Sue, dear, will you look after the customers while I talk to these young people?’
‘There’s the sandwiches not made yet,’ protested Sue.
‘I’ll do them,’ said Kate, cheerfully. ‘And let’s hope I don’t bleed into them too much.’ She picked up a knife and began to butter the slices of bread. The innkeeper and his wife looked less able to deal with Kate than with the taxi-drivers: but after hesitating a moment, the wife went out to the bar.
‘Now, sir,’ said the innkeeper.
I outlined for him the story of Bill’s death and my close contact with the taxi-drivers in the horse-box. I said, ‘If I can find out who’s at the back of Marconicars, I’ll probably have the man who arranged Major Davidson’s accident.’
‘Yes, I see that,’ he said. ‘I hope you have more luck than I’ve had. Trying to find out who owns Marconicars is like running head on into a brick wall. Dead end. I’ll tell you all I can, though. The more people sniping at them, the sooner they’ll be liquidated.’ He leaned over and picked up two sandwiches. He gave one to me, and bit into the other.
‘Don’t forget to leave room for the roast lamb,’ said Kate, seeing me eating. She looked at her watch. ‘Oh, dear, we’ll be terribly late for dinner and I hate to make Aunt Deb cross.’ But she went on placidly with her buttering.
‘I bought the Blue Duck eighteen months ago,’ said the innkeeper. “When I got out into civvy street.’
‘Sergeant-major?’ I murmured.
‘Regimental,’ he said, with justifiable pride. ‘Thomkins, my name is. Well, I bought The Blue Duck with my savings and my retirement pay, and dead cheap it was too. Too cheap. I should have known there’d be a catch. We hadn’t been here more than three weeks, and taking good money too, when this chap comes in one night and says as bold as brass that if we didn’t pay up like the last landlord it’d be just too bad for us. And he picked up six glasses off the bar and smashed them. He said he wanted fifty quid a week. Well, I ask you, fifty quid! No wonder the last landlord wanted to get out. I was told afterwards he’d been trying to sell the place for months, but all the locals found out they would be buying trouble and left it alone for some muggins like me straight out of the army and still wet behind the ears to come along and jump in with my big feet.’
Innkeeper Thomkins chewed on his sandwich while he thought.
‘Well, then, I told him to eff off. And he came back the next night with about five others and smashed the place to bits. They knocked me out with one of my own bottles and locked my wife in the heads. Then they smashed all the bottles in the bar and all the glasses, and all the chairs. When I came round I was lying on the floor in the mess, and they were standing over me in a ring. They said that was just a taste. If I didn’t cough up the fifty quid a week they’d be back to smash every bottle in the store-room and all the wine in the cellar. After that, they said, it would be my wife.’
His face was furious, as he relived it.
‘What happened? I asked.
‘Well, my God, after the Germans and the Japs I wasn’t giving in meekly to some little runts at the English sea-side. I paid up for a couple of months to give myself a bit of breathing space, but fifty quid takes a bit of finding, on top of overheads and taxes. It’s a good little business, see, but at that rate I wasn’t going to be left with much more than my pension. It wasn’t on.’
‘Did you tell the police?’ I asked.
A curious look of shame came into Thomkins’ face. ‘No’, he said hesitantly, ‘not then I didn’t. I didn’t know then where the men had come from, see, and they’d threatened God knows what if I went to the police. Anyway, it’s not good army tactics to re-engage an enemy who has defeated you once, unless you’ve got reinforcements. That’s when I started to think about a dog. And I did go to the police later,’ he finished, a little defensively.
‘Surely the police can close the Marconicar taxi line if it’s being used for systematic crime,’ I said.
‘Well, you’d think so,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t like that. It’s a real taxi service, you know. A big one. Most of the drivers are on the up and up and don’t even know what’s going on. I told a couple of them once that they were a front for the protection racket and they refused to believe me. The crooked ones look so plausible, see? Just like the others. They drive a taxi up to your door at closing time, say, all innocent like, and walk in and ask quietly for the money; and as like as not they’ll pick up a customer in the pub and drive him home for the normal fare as respectable as you please.’
‘Couldn’t you have a policeman in plain clothes sitting at the bar ready to arrest the taxi driver when he came to collect the money?’ suggested Kate.
The innkeeper said bitterly, ‘It wouldn’t do no good, miss. It isn’t only that they come in on different days, at different times, so that a copper might have to wait a fortnight to catch one, but there aren’t any grounds for arrest. They’ve got an I.O.U. with my signature on it for fifty pounds, and if there was any trouble with the police, all they’d have to do would be show it, and they couldn’t be touched. The police’ll help all right if you can giv
e them something they can use in court, but when it’s just one man’s word against another, they can’t do much.’
‘A pity you signed the I.O.U.,’ I sighed.
‘I didn’t,’ he said, indignantly, ‘but it looks like my signature, even to me. I tried to grab it once, but the chap who showed it to me said it wouldn’t matter if I tore it up, they’d soon make out another one. They must have had my signature on a letter or something, and copied it. Easy enough to do.’
‘You do pay them, then,’ I said, rather disappointed.
‘Not on your nellie, I don’t,’ said the innkeeper, his moustache bristling. ‘I haven’t paid them a sou for a year or more. Not since I got Prince. He chewed four of them up in a month, and that discouraged them, I can tell you. But they’re still around all the time. Sue and I daren’t go out much, and we always go together and take Prince with us. I’ve had burglar alarm bells put on all the doors and windows and they go off with an awful clatter if anyone tries to break in while we’re out or asleep. It’s no way to live, sir. It’s getting on Sue’s nerves.’
‘What a dismal story,’ said Kate, licking chutney off her fingers. ‘Surely you can’t go on like that for ever?’
‘Oh, no, miss, we’re beating them now. It isn’t only us, see, that they got money from. They had a regular round. Ten or eleven pubs like ours—free houses. And a lot of little shops, tobacconists, souvenir shops, that sort of thing, and six or seven little cafés. None of the big places. They only pick on businesses run by the people who own them, like us. When I cottoned to that I went round to every place I thought they might be putting the screws on and asked the owners straight out if they were paying protection. It took me weeks, it’s such a big area. The ones that were paying were all dead scared, of course, and wouldn’t talk, but I knew who they were, just by the way they clammed up. I told them we ought to stop paying and fight. But a lot of them have kids and they wouldn’t risk it, and you can’t blame them.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Kate, enthralled.
