Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  “They’re beauties, ent they, Rob?” said the fat boy. He and the red-haired boy both had guns like their leader’s. The smallest boy had nothing. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shining beauties.

  “Made in Belgium,” said Rob. “See that gadget?” He put the tip of his finger on the telltale at the end of the compression chamber. “You don’t just open it and shut it, like a cheap air-gun. You pump this one up slowly. That gadget shows you when the pressure’s right. It’s accurate up to fifty yards.”

  “It may be accurate,” said the fat boy. “What about us? I’ve never had a gun before.”

  “We’ll have to practise. Practise till we can hit a penny across the room.”

  “Why don’t we start right now, Rob?” said the red-haired boy. “These things don’t make any noise. Not to notice. We could chalk up a target on the wall—”

  “Yes?” said Rob. “And when the geezer who owns this shop comes up here tomorrow morning, or next week, or whenever he does happen to come up here, and he finds his wall full of air-gun pellets, he’s going to start thinking, isn’t he? He’s going to check over his spare stock, and find three guns missing. Right?”

  “That’s right,” said the fat boy. “Rob’s got it figured out. We put everything else back like we found it, it may be months before he knows what’s been took. He mayn’t even know anyone’s broke in.”

  The leader turned to the smallest of his followers. “That’s why you can’t have one, Winkle,” he said. “There’s plenty of guns in the front of the shop, but we touch one of them, he’ll miss it.”

  “That’s all right, Rob,” said Winkle. But he couldn’t keep the longing out of his voice. To own a big, bright gun! A gun that went phtt softly, like an angry snake, and your enemy fifty yards away crumpled to the ground, not knowing what had hit him!

  “What about Les?” said the red-haired boy.

  “What about him?”

  “He’ll want a gun when he sees ours.”

  “He’ll have to go on wanting. If he’s not keen enough to come with us on a job like this.”

  “’Tisn’t that he’s not keen,” said the fat boy. “It’s his old man. He’s pretty strict. He locks his bedroom door now. Where are we going to practise, Rob?”

  “I’ve got an idea about that,” said the tall boy. “You know the old sports pavilion? The Home Guard used it in the war, but it’s been shut up since.”

  The boys nodded.

  “I found a way in at the back, from the railway. I’ll show you. There’s a sort of cellar with lockers in it. That’ll do us fine. We’ll have our first meeting there tomorrow. Right?”

  “Right,” they all said. The red-haired boy added, “How did you know about this place, Rob?”

  “My family used to live round here,” said the tall boy. “Before my Ma died, when we moved up to Highside. As a matter of fact, I was at school about a quarter of a mile from here.”

  The fat boy said, “I bet I get a strapping from my old man when I get home. He don’t like me being away all day.”

  “You’re all right,” said Winkle. “You’re fat. It don’t hurt so much when you’re fat.” He looked down with disgust at his own slender limbs.

  It was nine o’clock at night nearly a month after that talk and in quite another part of London, that Fishy Codlin was closing what he called his Antique shop. This was a dark and rambling suite of rooms, full of dirt, woodworm, and the household junk of a quarter of a century. Codlin was in the front room, locking away the day’s take, when the two boys came in.

  “You’re too late,” he growled. “I’m shut.”

  He noticed that the smaller of the boys stayed by the door, while the older came towards him with a curiously purposeful tread. He had a prevision of trouble, and his hand reached out for the light switch.

  “Leave it alone,” said the boy. He was a half-seen figure in the dusk. All the light seemed to concentrate on the bright steel weapon in his hand. “Slip the bolt, Will,” he added, but without taking his eyes off Codlin. “Now you stand away from the counter.”

  Codlin stood away. He thought for a moment of refusing, for there was nearly twenty-five pounds in the box, the fruits of a full week’s trading. But he was a coward as well as a bully and the gun looked real. He watched the notes disappearing in the boy’s pocket. There was no hurry. When one of the notes slipped to the floor the boy bent down and picked it up, but without ever removing his steady gaze from the old man.

  When he had finished, he backed away to the door. “Stay put,” he said. “And keep quiet for five minutes, or you’ll get hurt.”

  Then he was gone. Codlin breathed out an obscenity and jumped for the telephone. As he picked it up, “I warned you,” said a gentle voice from the door. There was a noise like a small tyre bursting and the telephone twisted round and clattered to the floor.

  Codlin stood, staring stupidly at his hand. Splinters of vulcanite had grooved it, and the blood was beginning to drip. He cursed, foully and automatically. Footsteps were pattering away along the road outside. He let them get to the corner before he moved. He was taking no further chances. Then he lumbered across to the door, threw it open and started bellowing.

  Three streets away Detective Sergeant Petrella, homeward bound, heard two things at once. Distant shouts of outrage, and, much closer at hand, light feet pattering on the pavement. He drew into the shadow at the side of the road and waited.

  The two boys came round the corner, running easily, and laughing. When Petrella stepped out, the laughter ceased. Then the boys spun around, and started to run the other way.

  Petrella ran after them. He saw at once that he could not catch both, and concentrated on the younger and slower boy. After a hundred yards he judged himself to be in distance, and jumped forward in a tackle. It was high by the standards of Twickenham, but it was effective, and they went down, the boy underneath. As they fell, something dropped from the boy’s pocket and slid, ringing and spinning, across the pavement.

  “Of course you’ve got to charge him,” said Haxtell later that night. “It’s true Codlin can’t really identify him, but the boy had a gun on him, and he was running away from the scene of the crime. Who is he, by the way?”

  “His name’s Christopher Connolly. His father’s a shunter at the goods depot. I’ve left them together for a bit, to see if the old man can talk some sense into him.”

  “Good idea,” said Haxtell. “Can we get anything on the gun?”

  “It’s an air-pistol. Therefore no registration number. And foreign. Newish. And a pretty high-powered job. If it’s been stolen we might have it on the lists.”

  “Check it,” said Haxtell. “What about his pockets?”

  “Nothing except this.” Petrella pushed across a scrap of paper. It had pencilled on it, in capital letters:

  WILL. BE AT USUAL PLACE 8 TONIGHT.

  “What do you make of it?” said Haxtell.

  “It depends,” said Petrella cautiously, “if you think the dot after the first word is a full stop or just an accident.”

  Haxtell tried it both ways. “You mean it could be a plain statement: ‘I will be at the usual place at eight o’clock tonight.’ Or it could be an order, addressed to someone called Will.”

  “Yes. And Codlin did say that he thought he heard the bigger boy address the smaller one as Will.”

  “Is Connolly’s name William?”

  “No, sir. It’s Christopher George. Known to his friends as Chris.”

  “What does he say about the paper?”

  “Says I planted it on him. And the gun, of course.”

  “I often wonder,” said Haxtell, “where the police keep all the guns they’re supposed to plant on criminals. What about the other boy?”

  “He says there was no other boy. He says he was alone, and had been alone, all the evening.”

  “I see.” Haxtell stared thoughtfully out of the window. He had a sharp nose for trouble.

  “One bright spot,” he
said at last. “Codlin always marked his notes. Ever since he caught an assistant trying to dip into his till. He puts a letter C in indelible pencil on the back.”

  “That might be a help if we can catch the other boy,” agreed Petrella. He added, “Haven’t I heard that name Codlin before? Something about a dog.”

  “He tied his dog up,” said Haxtell. “A nice old spaniel. And beat him with a golf club. Fined forty shillings. It was before your time.”

  “I must have read about it somewhere,” said Petrella.

  “And if you think,” blared Haxtell, “that that’s any reason for not catching these – these young bandits – then I dare you to say it.”

  “Why, certainly not,” said Petrella hastily.

  “This is the third hold-up in a fortnight. The third that’s been reported to us. All with guns – or what looked like guns. Now we’ve caught one of them. We’ve got to get the names of the other boys out of him. For their sake as much as anything. Before someone really gets hurt.”

  “I expect the boy’ll talk,” said Petrella.

  Haxtell nodded. Given time, boys usually talked.

  But Christopher Connolly was an exception. For he said nothing, and continued to say nothing.

  The next thing that happened, happened to old Mrs. Lightly, who lived alone in a tiny cottage above the waterworks. Her husband had been caretaker, and she had retained the cottage by grace of the management, as long as she paid the rent of ten shillings a week. Lately she had been getting irregular in her payments, and she was now under notice to quit.

  The evening after the capture of Connolly, just after dark, she heard a noise down in her front hall. She was a spirited old lady, and she came right out, carrying a candle to see what it was all about.

  On the patched linoleum lay a fat envelope. Mrs. Lightly picked it up gingerly and carried it back to the sitting room. She got very few letters, and, in any case, the last post had come and gone many hours earlier.

  On the envelope, in pencilled capital letters, were the words:

  EIGHT WEEKS RENT FROM SOME FRIENDS.

  Mrs. Lightly set the candle down on the table, and with fingers that trembled tore open the flap. A little wad of notes slid out. She counted them. Two pound notes and four ten-shilling notes. There was no shadow of doubt about it. It was four pounds. And that was eight weeks’ rent.

  Or, looked at in another way, suppose it was seven weeks’ rent. That would have the advantage of leaving ten shillings over for a little celebration. The whole thing was clearly a miracle; and miracles are things which the devout are commanded to commemorate. Mrs. Lightly placed the notes in the big black bag, folded the envelope carefully away behind a china dog on the mantelshelf, and got her best black hat out of the cupboard.

  On the same evening, shortly after Mrs. Lightly left her cottage, four boys were sitting in the basement changing room of the old sports pavilion. A storm lantern, standing on a locker, shed a circle of clear white light around it, leaving the serious faces of the boys in shadow. The windows were covered on the inside with cardboard and brown paper.

  “I don’t like it, Rob,” the black-haired boy was saying. He was evidently repeating an old argument.

  “What’s wrong with it?” said the tall boy. He had a curiously gentle voice.

  “Old Cator’s what’s wrong with it. He’s a holy terror.”

  “He’s a crook,” said the fat boy.

  The small boy said nothing. His eyes turned from one to the other as they spoke, but when no one was speaking they rested on the tall boy, full of trust and love.

  “Isn’t it crooks we’re out to fix?” said the tall boy. “Isn’t that right, Busty?”

  “That’s right,” said the fat boy.

  The black-haired boy said, “Hell, yes. But not just any crooks. Cator’s got a night-watchman. And he’s a tough, too. As likely as not, they both carry guns.”

  The tall boy said, “Are you afraid?”

  “Of course I’m not afraid.”

  “Then what are we arguing about? There’s four of us. And we’ve got two guns. There’s two of them. When we pull the job, maybe only one’ll be there. This is something we’ve got to do. We need the money.”

  “Another thing,” said the black-haired boy. “Suppose we don’t give quite so much away this time.”

  “You mean, keep some for ourselves?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What for?”

  “I could think of ways to use it,” said the black-haired boy, with a laugh. He looked round, but neither of the others had laughed with him. “All right,” he said. “All right. I know the rules. Let’s get this planned out.”

  “This is how it is, then,” said the tall boy. “I reckon we’ll have to wait about a week. . .” He demonstrated, on sheets of paper, with a pencil, and the four heads came close together, casting long shadows in the lamplight.

  Next morning Petrella reported to Chief Inspector Haxtell the minor events of the night. There was a complaint from the railway that some boys had broken a hole in the fence below the sports pavilion.

  “Apart from that,” said Petrella, “a beautiful calm seems to have fallen on Highside. Oh – apart from Mrs. Lightly.”

  “Mrs. Lightly?”

  “Old Lightly’s widow. The one who lives in the cottage next to the waterworks.”

  “Was that the one there was a bit in the papers about how she couldn’t pay her rent?”

  “That’s right,” said Petrella. “Only she got hold of some money, and that’s what the drinking was about. It was a celebration. She seems to have drunk her way steadily along the High Street. Mostly gin, but a certain amount of stout to help it down. She finished by busting a shop window with an empty bottle.”

  “Where’d she got the money from?”

  “That’s the odd thing. She was flat broke. Faced with eviction, and no one very sympathetic, because they knew that as soon as she got any money she’d drink it up. Then an angel dropped in, with four quid in an envelope.”

  “An angel?”

  “That’s what she says. A disembodied spirit. It popped an envelope through the letterbox with four ten-shilling notes and two pounds in it.”

  “How much of it was left when you picked her up?”

  “About two pounds ten,” said Petrella.

  “I don’t see anything odd in all that,” said Haxtell. “Some crackpot reads in the papers that the old girl’s short of money and how her landlord’s persecuting her, and he makes her an anonymous donation, which she promptly spends on getting plastered.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Petrella. He added gently, “I’ve seen the notes she didn’t spend. They’re all marked on the back with a C in indelible pencil.”

  “They’re what?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “It’s mad.”

  “It’s a bit odd, certainly,” said Petrella. Something, a note almost of smugness in his voice, made the Superintendent look up. “Have you got some line on this?”

  “I think I might be able to trace those notes back to the boy who’s been running this show.”

  “Then don’t waste any time talking about it,” said Haxtell. “We need results, and we need ’em quickly. We’ve got to get some results.” He added, with apparent inconsequence, “I’m seeing Barstow this afternoon.”

  Petrella’s hopes, such as they were, derived from the envelope, which he had duly recovered from behind the china dog on Mrs. Lightly’s mantelshelf. The name and address had been cut out, but two valuable pieces of information had been left behind. The first was the name Strangeway’s printed in the top left-hand corner. The second was the postmark, the date on which was still legible.

  Petrella knew Strangeway’s. It was a shop that sold cameras and photographic equipment, and he guessed that its daily output of letters would not be large. There was a chance, of course, that the envelope had been picked up casually. But equally, there was a chance that it had not.

&nbs
p; Happily, the manager of Strangeway’s was a methodical man. He consulted his daybook, and produced for Petrella a list of names and addresses. “I think,” he said, “that those would be all the firm’s letters that went out that day. They would be bills or receipts. I may have written one or two private letters, but I’d have no record of them.”

  “But they wouldn’t be in your firm’s envelopes.”

  “They might be. If they went to suppliers.”

  “I’ll try these first,” said Petrella.

  There were a couple of dozen names on the list. Most of the addresses were in Highside or Helenwood.

  It was no use inventing any very elaborate story. He was too well known locally to pretend to be an insurance salesman. He decided on a simple lie.

  To the grey-haired old lady who opened the door to him at the first address he said, “We’re checking the election register. The lists are getting out of date. Have you any children in the house who might come of age in the next five years?”

  “There’s Jimmy,” said the woman.

  “Who’s Jimmy?”

  She explained about Jimmy. He was a real terror. Aged about nineteen. Just as Petrella was getting interested in Jimmy she added that he’d been in Canada for a year.

  Petrella took down copious details about Jimmy. It all took time, but if you were going to deal in lies, it was as well to act them out.

  That was the beginning of a long day’s work. Early in the evening he came to No. 11 Parham Crescent. The house was no different from a million others of the brick boxes that encrust the surface of London’s northern heights.

  The door was opened by a gentleman in shirtsleeves, who agreed that his name was Brazier and admitted to the possession of a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old boy called Robert.

  “Robert Brazier?”

  “Robert Humphreys. He’s my sister’s son. She’s been dead two years. He lives here – when he’s home.”

  Petrella picked up the lead with the skill of long experience. Was Robert often away from home?

  Mr. Brazier obliged with a discourse on modern youth. Boys nowadays, Petrella gathered, were very unlike what boys used to be when he – Mr. Brazier – had been young. They lacked reverence for their elders, thought they knew all the answers, and preferred to go their own ways. “Sometimes I don’t see him all day. Sometimes two days running. He could be out all night for all I know. It’s not right – Mr. – um. . .”