The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “There was no portrait, remember?”

  “Not under the velvet, no. I meant the one you stole when everyone was crowding into the room when Bubbles found Boucard’s body.”

  Fizzy reached into her handbag for a cigarette and attached it to the holder with a surprisingly steady hand.

  “I don’t even like Louis’s work,” she said. “Why would I steal one of his beastly paintings? Cubist mixed with Symbolist—”

  “ – and just the merest smidgen of the draughtsmanship one sees in Migliorini. Yes, I know. Ghastly, aren’t they? Especially the portraits of masked nudes with one brown eye and one blue.”

  A lighter clicked in the darkness and suddenly Fizzy’s hand was anything but steady.

  “I saw it in his studio when I went round to persuade him to lay off my brother. Unfortunately, our French friend was out, so I never did get chance to exercise my knuckles. Shame, that.”

  “Maybe that was another practical joke,” she said evenly. “I mean, we’ve all been searched. Thoroughly, as I recall.”

  A soft laugh echoed into the night. “Ah, women! What cunning and devious creatures thou art, is it any wonder we men are in thy thrall? First, Gloria—”

  “How did you know it was her?”

  “Don’t tell anyone, but His Majesty’s Intelligence Service relies more on guesswork than they’d like people to think. But in this case, Miss Potter, I know Boucard, I know his type and more importantly—”

  Before she’d even realised what had happened, she found herself in his arms.

  “ – I know how human minds tick. Not to mention,” he added an eternity later, “that there are widgets designed to stop ladies’ hats from bowling down Mayfair that are called, strangely enough, hat pins.”

  “And the panther?”

  “Who else would cover up another person’s murder? I suspect they’ll both view each other differently from now own. A rather more balanced relationship, one would hope.”

  “So that’s what you meant by happy endings and true love running smooth.”

  “Hadn’t quite got to that last bit,” he said, kissing her again. “Only it strikes me that Fizzy Potter is a nice enough name, whereas Fizzy Hardcastle tends to run off the tongue rather more smoothly, don’t you think?”

  She couldn’t be hearing this right. “Edward James Hardcastle, are you actually asking me to marry you?”

  “Not tonight. Far too late to knock up a vicar. But yes. That seems to be the general consensus.”

  But . . . Fizzy pulled away.

  “What about the painting?”

  “What about it?” he rasped, drawing her back, and when they finally came up for air, he said, “I don’t imagine you’ll make a habit of stealing. I mean, the logistics of bringing the kids to visit you in the clink would be an absolute nightmare.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she stuttered.

  He gave her nose a little tweak.

  “Like my kid brother, darling, we all have siblings.”

  He tilted her chin up to face him.

  “The eyes were the wrong way round, Fizzy. Yours,” he said kissing them in turn, “are blue on the left, brown on the right and trust me, artists of Boucard’s calibre don’t get such details wrong.”

  For the first time in her life, Fizzy knew what it was to be floating on air.

  “I suppose I might consider marrying you—” she began, though her actual thoughts ran more along the lines of wild horses.

  “Very kind.’

  “ – but what about money? Neither of us earns very much—”

  “True,” he agreed, “but don’t you think this,” he whisked off her cloche hat and pulled out “Woman in a Mask”, “should get us off to a good start?”

  “Do you mind!”

  Fizzy snatched at her sister’s naked image and stuffed it back under the brim.

  “It’s worth a fortune on the black market,” he rumbled.

  “Teddy Hardcastle, you aren’t seriously asking me to weigh my sister’s morals against cold hard cash?”

  She rammed the cloche back over her bob.

  “Because if you are, you ought to know right now that I won’t use something as tawdry as this to pay my electricity bill!”

  She adjusted the cloche and thought, silly cow. Shouldn’t have posed for him in the first place.

  “A honeymoon, on the other hand . . .”

  Teddy’s laughter echoed into the darkness. “Which do you fancy, you wicked, wicked child? A fortnight in Antibes? Or would you prefer to see Venice?”

  Fizzy snuggled back into his muscular arms. “Don’t care,” she murmured.

  Because with that painting they could afford both.

  The Day of Two Cars

  GILLIAN LINSCOTT

  Now here’s a little-known fact. Did you know that the very first public telephone box was set up in Britain in 1921? And not just in cities but in rural areas, areas where city life seemed so far away. That’s the scene that Gillian Linscott wanted to explore, where rural and city life met in the 1920s. Gillian is no stranger to the 1920s, or rather the years leading up to them. Her series about suffragette Nell Bray, which began in Sister Beneath the Sheets (1991) has taken us from the Edwardian period and through the First World War.

  “It was a young woman who found him,” the village constable said. “Molly Davitt, the blacksmith’s daughter. She thought he was having a conversation on the telephone. After a while when he didn’t move she decided something might be wrong.”

  “After how long, exactly?” the inspector asked. He was a city man and disliked vagueness.

  “Half an hour or so, Molly says. Could be longer.”

  “You mean to tell me this young woman stood watching a man in a telephone box for half an hour or more?”

  “There’s not much happens round here. And the fact is, Molly’s been fascinated with that telephone box from the time they put it up.”

  It was the spring of 1924 when they came to install the telephone box in Tadley Gate. Nobody was quite sure why. The men from the Post Office travelled from Hereford, 17 miles away as the pigeon flew and half as much again by winding country road. All they knew was that they’d been instructed to erect the standard model Kiosk One, designed to be especially suitable for rural areas, on the edge of the common, in between the old pump and the new war memorial. It was made of reinforced concrete slabs with a red painted wooden door and large windows in the door and sides. In a touch of Post Office swagger, a decorative curlicue of wrought iron crowned it, finishing in a spike that some people assumed was an essential part of the mechanism. Nobody in Tadley Gate (pop. 227) had asked for a telephone kiosk and very few had ever used a telephone. Still, they were pleased. The coming of the kiosk was an event at least, which made two events in eighteen months, counting back to the other new arrival, the petrol pump. The petrol pump belonged to Davy Davitt, Molly’s father. A third generation blacksmith by trade, he’d had more than enough of horses and fallen in love with cars. The sign over his workshop said “Blacksmith and Farrier” in the curly old-fashioned letters that had been good enough for his grandfather. Underneath he’d painted, stark and white. “Motor Vehicle Repairs Undertaken.” The fact that the parish included 33 horses and ponies and only one motor car limited his scope but he was a resourceful man. Long negotiations with a distant petrol company ended with the arrival of a tank and a pump. The pump was red like the phone kiosk door, topped by a globe of frosted glass with a cockleshell and “Sealed Shell” on it in black letters. The tank below it held 500 gallons of petrol, delivered by motor tanker. In the first year Davy’s only sales were five gallons every other week to the colonel from the big house who drove a Hillman Peace model very cautiously, so at that rate it would be nearly four years before the tanker needed to come with another delivery. But as Davy told anybody who’d listen in the Duke of Wellington, that was only the start. He was looking ahead to the arrival of the motor tourer. It stood to reason that as more peo
ple bought cars and the cars became more reliable, they’d drive for pleasure far away from cities and into the countryside. It didn’t matter that the only motor tourist Tadley Gate had ever seen was somebody who’d got badly confused on the way to Shrewsbury and didn’t want to be there. Davy believed in the petrol pump the way an Indian believed in his totem pole. He was even inclined to credit it with attracting the telephone kiosk to the village. He reasoned that now, properly equipped with both telephone and petrol pump, Tadley Gate was ready to unglue itself from the mud and enter the age of speed. Only the age of speed seemed to be taking its time about getting there.

  Molly had no strong feelings about the petrol pump. She didn’t like the smell much, but petrol was no worse than the throat-grabbing whiff of burning horn when her father fitted red-hot shoes to horses’ hooves. On the other hand, the phone box enchanted her from the day it arrived. She was twenty then and single, having just broken her engagement to a local farmer’s son. The second broken engagement, as it happened, and more than enough to get her a reputation as a jilt. She honestly regretted that. She’d quite liked the farmer’s son, as she’d quite liked the young grain merchant before him, but shied away from marriage because they were both of them firmly tied by work and family to the country around Tadley Gate. If she married either of them she’d have had to stay there for life and she knew – with the instinct that tells a buried bulb which way is upwards – that staying at Tadley Gate wasn’t the way things were meant to be. She’d been away from the village once, for a family wedding in Birmingham where she’d been a bridesmaid. In the days before and after the ceremony she’d gone with her cousins to the cinema, bought underwear in a department store, read the Daily Mail and seen advertisements in magazines of sleek women poised on diving boards, leaning against the bonnets of cars, dancing quick-time foxtrot in little pointed shoes with men in evening dress. At the end of the visit she’d gone quietly back to Tadley Gate with a new shorter hairstyle that nobody commented on, an unused lipstick tucked into her skirt pocket and a conviction as deep as her father’s belief in his petrol pump that the world must somehow find itself her way. The men who came to set up the telephone kiosk, pleased to find an unexpectedly beautiful girl in such an out of the way place, had been only too pleased as they worked to answer the questions she put to them in her soft local accent.

  “So who can you talk to from here?” (She had the idea that a telephone had a predetermined number of lines, each one to a different and single other telephone.)

  “Anyone,” they said.

  The elder and more serious of the two explained that when she went into the kiosk and picked up the receiver, a buzzer would sound in the telephone exhange. Then, in exchange for coins in the slot, the operator would connect her with anybody she wanted, anywhere in the country.

  “But how would she know? How would the operator know where to find them?”

  “Everybody has their own number,” the older man explained. “They’re written down on a list.”

  “So if you had a particular friend,” the younger man said, risking a wink at her, “he’d give you his exchange and number and you’d give that to the operator, then you could talk to him even if he was hundreds of miles away.”

  “So I could stand here and talk to somebody in Birmingham or London?”

  “As long as your pennies lasted,” the other man said.

  At lunchtime she brought them out bread and cheese and cups of tea. At the end of the afternoon as they packed up their tools, the younger man explained about police calls.

  “You don’t have to put any money in. Just tell the operator you want police and she puts you straight through.”

  “To Constable Price?”

  He was their local man, operating from his police house in a larger village three miles away.

  “Or any policeman. Just run to the box, pick up the telephone and they’ll come racing along as if they was at Brooklands.”

  Constable Price only had a bicycle. She assumed a telephone call would bring a faster kind of police altogether. It all added to the glamour of the phone kiosk. When the men had gone she stood looking at it for a long time, went in and touched the receiver gently and reverently. It was inert on its cradle and yet she felt it buzzing with the potential of a whole world. Every day her errands around the village would take her past it. She’d slow down, touch the kiosk, sometimes go inside and touch the receiver itself, trying to find the courage to pick it up. One autumn day, she managed it. The woman’s voice at the other end, bright and metallic as a new sixpence, said “Hello. What number please?” She dropped the receiver back on its cradle, heart thumping. She didn’t know anybody’s number, nobody’s in the world. But in her dreams, one day a number would come into her head and she’d say it. Then the operator would say “Certainly, madam,” the way they did in the department stores in Birmingham, the phone would click and buzz and there would be somebody on the other end – London, Worcester, anywhere – who’d say how nice to hear from her and he could tell from her voice that he’d like her no end, so why didn’t he come in a car or even an aeroplane and whisk her away to a place where she could quick-time foxtrot in little pointed shoes and drink from a triangular glass under a striped umbrella? What was the point of telephones, after all, if they couldn’t do magic? So like her father with his petrol pump she waited patiently for it to happen.

  “So,” the Inspector said, “Miss Davitt decides after half an hour or possibly longer that all might not be well with our man in the kiosk. So she looks more closely and finds Tod Barker with the back of his head cracked open the way you’d take a spoon to your breakfast egg.”

  Constable Price thought inappropriately of the good brown eggs his hens laid in their run at the back of his police house.

  “Yes, sir. Only she didn’t know it was Tod Barker, of course. She’d never seen the man before.”

  “Which isn’t surprising, because as we know the only times you’d find Tod Barker outside the East End was when he was on a race course or in prison. And unless I’m misinformed, there aren’t any prisons or race courses in this neck of the woods.”

  “No, sir. He had quite a record, didn’t he? Three burglaries, two assaults, two robberies with violence and four convictions for off-course betting.”

  This feat of memory from the documents he’d read earned him an approving look from the inspector. But Constable Price reminded himself that a village bobby who wanted to keep his job shouldn’t be too clever.

  “Those are just the ones they managed to make stick in court,” the inspector said. “Plenty of enemies in the underworld too. Our colleagues in London weren’t surprised to hear that somebody had given Tod Barker a cranial massage with an iron bar.”

  “An iron bar, was it?”

  “So the laboratory men say. Flakes of rust in the wound.”

  “And nobody surprised?”

  “Not that he was dead, no. Not even that he was dead in a phone box. In the betting trade I gather they spend half their lives on the telephone.”

  “And we know he’d made a call from that box earlier in the day.”

  “Yes, and since they keep a record at the exhange of the numbers, we know the call was to the bookmaker he works for back in London. So no surprise there either. In fact, you might say there’s only one surprise in the whole business.”

  The inspector waited for a response. Constable Price realised that he was in danger of over-playing rural slowness.

  “Why here, you mean, sir?”

  “Exactly, constable. Why – when Tod Barker regarded the countryside as something you drove through as quickly as possible to get to the next race meeting – should he be killed somewhere at the back of beyond like Tadley Gate?”

  “There’s the petrol pump, of course.” Constable Price said it almost to himself.

  “Does that mean you get a lot of cars here?”

  “No sir. We had two of them here on the day he was killed and I’d say two cars in
one day was a record for Tadley Gate.”

  When the first of the cars arrived, around midday on a fine Thursday in hay-making time, Molly was sitting at the parlour table with the accounts book open in front of her, getting on with her task of sending out bills to her father’s customers. Men’s voices came from outside and the sound of slow pneumatic wheels on the road. She jumped up, glad to be distracted, and looked out of the window. Advancing into their yard came an open-topped four-seater, sleek and green. A man with brown hair and very broad shoulders sat in the driving seat. It moved with funereal slowness because the engine wasn’t running at all. Its motive power came from two men pushing from the back. One of them was plump, middle-aged and red-faced. The other – bent over with his shoulder against the car – happened to glance up as Molly looked out of the window. He smiled when he saw her and her heart did such a jolt of shock and unbelief that it felt like a metal plate with her father’s biggest hammer coming down on it.

  She thought, “Did I really telephone for him after all?”

  Then, because she was essentially a good and practical girl, she told herself not to be a mardy ha’porth, of course she hadn’t, so stop day-dreaming and get on with it. Her father hadn’t heard or seen the car because he was hammering a damaged coulter in his forge out the back. It was up to her to get into the yard and see what they wanted. As she stepped outside the two men stopped pushing and let the car come to a halt not far from the petrol pump.

  “Is there a mechanic here? Call him quickly, would you.”

  It was the older, red-faced man who spoke, in a south Wales accent. The other man, the one she’d have called on the telephone if she knew he existed and had his number, straightened up and smiled at her again, rubbing his back with both hands. He was pretending that pushing the car had exhausted him but Molly knew at once from the smile and the exaggeration of his movements that he wasn’t exhausted at all, was just making a pantomime of it for her amusement. She smiled back at him. He was taller than average and maybe five years or so older than she was, with black hair, very white teeth and dark eyes that seemed more alive to her than any she’d seen before. And the smiles they exchanged were like two people saying the same thing at once: “Well, fancy somebody like you being here.” But she had to turn away because the red-faced man was repeating his question loudly and urgently.