‘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 the 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 decided 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 racecourse or in prison. And unless I’m misinformed, there aren’t any prisons or racecourses 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 exchange 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 overplaying 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 daydreaming 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.
‘I’ll get my dad,’ she said, whirled away into the shadowy forge and shouted to him over he hammer blows. Davy Davitt followed her into the sunshine, still wearing his thick leather farrier’s apron and when he saw the motor car by his petrol pump his face lit up.
‘Twelve horse power, Rover, nice cars, six hundred pounds new,’ he murmured to himself. Then aloud, ‘What’s the trouble then, sir?’
‘Blessed axle gone,’ the red-faced man said. ‘These roads are an insult to motor cars, not a yard of tarmac in the last twenty miles.’
‘Come far, have you?’
‘Far enough,’ said the tall young man. ‘We started from Pontypridd.’
His voice was Welsh too, bright and dancing. The red-faced man gave him a hard look.
‘Doesn’t matter to him where we started, Sonny. Question is, can he do something so we can get where we’re going to?’
‘Where’s that then?’ Davy asked.
‘London. And we’re in a hurry.’
Even though the red-faced man’s voice was impatient, they were some of the sweetest words in the language to Davy. In seconds he was horizontal under the car, with the man bending himself double to try to see what was happening. Nobody was paying much attention to the other young man who’d been in the driving seat. He’d got out and was sitting, calm and contented in the sunshine, on the low stone wall between the house and the yard, looking at Molly. And Molly was staring enchanted at th
e man called Sonny because she’d just heard from his lips some of the sweetest words in the language to her.
‘Would there be anywhere here with a telephone I could use?’
Proudly she led him to the kiosk and sat on the step of the war memorial to watch. She always liked to watch, on the very rare occasions when people used the telephone, grieved by their hesitations and fumblings. Sonny was different. He didn’t pause to read the card of instructions, or drop coins on the concrete floor or fidget with doubt or embarrassment. He simply picked up the receiver and spoke into it as if it were a thing he did every day, easy as washing your hands. She saw a smile on his face and his lips moving and knew he must be giving a number to the distant operator then he must have been connected to his number because his lips were moving again though she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
* * * *
‘Blessed car’s broken down, back of beyond. No sign of them though. Didn’t guess we’d be going this way.’
He was speaking to his father, who ran a boxers’ training gymnasium in Pontypridd.
‘That’s where you’re wrong, boy. They’re right behind you. Left Cardiff early this morning in a black Austin 20, heading same way as you.’
‘How did they know, then?’
‘Never mind that. Fact is, they do know. Tell Enoch. You at a garage?’
‘Blacksmith’s with a petrol pump.’
‘Can’t miss you then, can they?’
‘They can’t do anything to him, not in broad daylight.’
‘Only takes a little nudge, you know that. Elbow in wrong place, oh dear so sorry, damage done.’
‘Enoch and me wouldn’t let a flea’s elbow near him, let alone theirs.’
‘You look after our boy.’
Molly watched as he came out of the kiosk looking worried.
‘Have you had bad news?’
It didn’t strike her that she had no right to ask this of a stranger. He answered her with another question.
‘Your father good with cars, is he?’
‘Very good.’
‘We need to be moving, see? Quicker than I thought.’
She caught his urgency and they practically ran back to the yard. By then her father was out from under the car and delivering his verdict. Beam axle gone and rear axle just holding together but wouldn’t make it to London. Both of them would need unbolting and welding.
‘How long?’ the red-faced man asked.
‘Two or three hours, with luck.’
‘Make it two hours or less and, whatever your bill is, I’ll give you ten pounds on top of it.’
Davy’s jaw dropped at the prospect of more money in two hours than he usually earned in a week. Then he went under the car with a spanner and Sonny, in his good suit and shiny shoes, went under too. Davy called out to Molly to go and tell Tick to make sure the fire in the forge was hot as he could make it. Tick was the apprentice, a large and powerful sixteen-year-old. Molly found him in the forge along with the other young man who’d been in the driving seat of the car and for an angry moment thought the two of them were fighting. Then she saw it was no more than play, the man dodging and dancing on the trodden earth floor among the scraps of metal and old horse-shoes, feet moving no more than an inch or two at a time, but enough to avoid the light punches Tick was aiming at him. A furious bellow came from behind them.
‘Rooster, are you bloody mad, boy? Come away from there.’
It was the red-faced man.
‘Sorry, Uncle Enoch.’
Obediently, the young man followed him out to the yard. Molly tried to give Tick her father’s instructions but could hardly get the boy to listen. His face was shiny with excitement.
‘Did you hear what he called him? I thought he might be, then I said to myself it couldn’t be. I’d only see’d him from a good way off and he looks different in his clothes. So I put my fists up, joking like, and he...’
‘What are you saying, Tick boy?’
‘The Rhondda Rooster, that’s all. He’s only the Rhondda Rooster!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Only the next British middleweight champion, that’s all. He’ll be fighting for the title in London the day after tomorrow and the money’s on him to win it.’
‘A boxer?’
‘Then he’ll take on the Empire champion after that. Could be world champion. When I see’d him at Cardiff he won by a knockout in three rounds against a heavier man even though there was so much blood pouring down his face he could only see from one eye.’
Molly was a country girl, not squeamish.
‘If he’s as good as you say, how come he’d got so much blood on him?’
‘He’s got a glass eyebrow.’
‘A what?’
‘That’s what they call a weak spot. Hard as iron all the rest of him, only he’s got an old cut over his left eyebrow and if that opens up it pours with blood so the referee would have had to stop the fight if he hadn’t knocked the other chap out first.’
* * * *
It turned out that her father had heard of the Rhondda Rooster too because he got his head out from under the car just long enough to tell Molly to make the gentlemen comfortable in the front parlour and get something to eat. She rushed round making tea in the good china pot, putting bread, cheese and cold beef on the best tablecloth. Sonny had come out from under the car by then and she was conscious all the time of his eyes on her. The Rooster’s eyes were just as admiring if she’d noticed, but he was nothing beside Sonny - shoulders and chest too broad for the cut of his suit, one ear a bit skew-whiff, big hands that he kept bunching and flexing all the time they weren’t occupied with knife and fork. Under the stern eye of the red-faced man, Uncle Enoch, he had the clumsy good manners of a schoolboy, while Sonny seemed a man of the great world. Occupied with serving them, she missed another milestone in the speeding up of life in Tadley Gate. Another stranger went into the phone kiosk and picked up the receiver. It was the first time since the kiosk was built that it had been used more than once in a day.
* * * *
The new stranger was small, dark-haired, and twentyish, in a dark suit and cow-dung smeared shoes that hadn’t been designed for country walking. He looked round to see nobody was watching and slid quickly into the box as if glad of its protection from the country all around him. The number he wanted was at an East London exchange.
‘Bit of luck. Their car’s broken down.’
‘Have they seen you?’
‘Naw, we came over a hill and saw them pushing it. So we turned off before they saw us and Gribby and me followed them on foot. Bleeding miles over the fields.’
‘Where’s Gribby?’
‘Keeping watch. Trouble is, they’ve all gone inside this house at the garage place.’
‘They’ll have to come out sometime.’
‘Won’t be easy, making it look like an accident.’
‘You could pay a boy to bung a stone at him.’
‘You joking?’
‘With what I’m paying you, don’t expect jokes as well. Next news I want to hear is the fight’s called off. Understood.’
‘Understood.’
* * * *
In the parlour, Uncle Enoch was restive.
‘I’m going to see how he’s doing with the car. You stay here, Sonny. Rooster can have another slice of beef if he likes but no more bread and for heaven’s sake don’t let him even sniff those pickled onions.’
* * * *
There was a tangle of briars and bushes at the back of the garden, clustering around the small stone building that sheltered the earth closet. Two rowans formed an arch over the pathway between the earth closet and the house. They’d been planted in a time when people still believed they kept away witches, all of fifty years ago, by Davy Davitt’s grandfather. Davy kept threatening to cut them down but never got round to it, so they formed a useful screen for Tod and Gribby. Tod came back from making his phone call and found his partner lurking in the bushes.
‘They still inside?’
‘The Rooster and the tall one are. His trainer’s gone inside the forge place. What’s that you got?’
Tod held out his hand to show him. It was a rusty horseshoe, worn thin and sharp on one side.
‘What’s that for then? Bring the Rooster good luck?’
‘Some kind of luck.’
Molly was in the kitchen, washing up. The Rooster was shifting around on his chair in the parlour. Because they’d started so early he’d missed his training run and his internal system was out of rhythm.
‘Where’s the little house then, Sonny boy?’
The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology] Page 43
