Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  About the Book

  The Fens, 1954.

  It has been another tough winter. Temperatures have plummeted and the ground is heavy with water. The Fenlands are alive with blackmarketeers, vagabonds and chancers, all trying to make their way.

  The shadow of the war still hangs over these lands. Many people have lost everything. Others just want the chance to begin again. For Jimmy Devlin, both are true.

  Forced from his home by bailiffs, Devlin must make a fresh start. He has nothing to his name. His only option is digging the drainage ditches the Fens so urgently need. But desperate people have a knack of finding trouble and he is no exception. It doesn’t take long before he’s in a downward spiral, caught in the wrong business with the wrong people and on the wrong side of the law …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Fens, 1954

  Part I: Summer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part II: Winter

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Edric

  Copyright

  Mercury Falling

  Robert Edric

  For Tony and Teresa Armitage

  The Fens, 1954

  Part I

  Summer

  1

  JIMMY DEVLIN WOKE to the sound of an engine in the yard below, followed by a man shouting. Devlin rubbed his eyes, yawned, stretched, waited. The engine was switched off and then stuttered for a few seconds, the noise like stones rattling in a tin. The same voice shouted again, louder, angrier. What was it his mother used to say? Only bad news ever arrived before noon.

  Devlin went naked to the window and looked down. The stale smell of the bed clung to him, as though he’d draped one of the unwashed sheets over his shoulders.

  Beneath him, the man climbed from the cab and walked to the door. A Bedford, probably ex-Army. Definitely ex-Army, which would account for the engine noise and the over-run. The flat wooden back was empty except for a tarpaulin and a pile of rope. Blue smoke hung in the still air.

  The man knocked on the door with the side of his fist and shouted again.

  Devlin opened the window and leaned out. ‘What you after?’ he shouted down.

  ‘You Jimmy Devlin?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  The man shook his head and turned back to the lorry.

  The passenger door opened and a fat, blonde woman swung her legs to hang awkwardly above the running board.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ she called to the man.

  ‘Another smart alec who wants me to guess if it’s him or not.’ The man shook his head again, spat heavily and turned back to Devlin. ‘You coming down or what? I’m getting a crick standing like this.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ Devlin shouted.

  The woman was fitted close into the tight space, her heavy thighs pressed against the stripped dash.

  ‘None of your business who she is,’ the man shouted. ‘She’s my wife.’

  ‘And who are you, while we’re at it?’

  The man grinned at this. ‘I, sonny-Jim, am the man whose letters you don’t answer.’

  ‘What letters?’ Devlin knew exactly what letters.

  ‘Landlord’s letters, bailiff’s letters. Notice of Eviction letters. That’s what letters. Starting to ring any distant bells in that tiny little skull of yours?’

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ Devlin said, his mouth dry, knowing he’d said too much.

  The man went to the small window beside the door, shielded his eyes and looked inside. ‘Probably them same letters you’ve got stacked all neat and tidy on the mantel wishing they’d go away. Which they won’t. A bit like me in that respect, because I’m going nowhere, either. You coming down or what? I spend half my life shouting through walls and doors at idiots like you and it’s starting to wear a bit thin. I’m Skelton, by the way, seeing as how you’re asking. Bailiff.’

  Devlin ran a hand down his pale chest and stomach. He took a step back from the window and left it swinging open.

  It was already warm. Not yet six on a summer’s morning. Sunlight fell in a beam across the dust-filled room, over the threadbare carpet and on to the faded, peeling wallpaper. A pattern of roses. It seemed to him as though nothing had ever changed in that room for fifty years past, longer.

  He dressed and went downstairs.

  He opened the door and pointed the slender rifle he now held at Skelton.

  The man had gone back to where his wife sat and the pair of them were sharing a cigarette. The woman’s hair was piled high beneath a transparent headscarf.

  ‘What’s he got that thing for?’ she said loudly, indicating the rifle.

  Skelton turned and looked Devlin up and down. ‘You think I never been threatened before, boy? And by bigger men than you. Besides, look at it. What is it?’

  ‘A gun,’ Devlin said.

  Skelton laughed. ‘Steal it from the funfair, did you? It’s a rat gun, that’s all. And even they wouldn’t run too fast at the sight of it. You wouldn’t even touch a rabbit at twenty yards with that thing.’

  ‘Don’t you be too sure of that,’ Devlin said. ‘Plenty of rabbits already made that mistake.’ One rabbit. Wounded, and already diseased when he finally caught up with it at the Moulton drain. Killed with the rifle stock and then thrown into the water.

  ‘Apart from which,’ Skelton went on, nudging his wife, ‘it’d probably have to be stuck halfway up the rat’s arse for the poor little bugger to even feel it.’ The pair of them laughed.

  Then the man came to Devlin, put his hand on the end of the thin barrel and pushed it to one side. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’ve made your point, son. Time to get down to business. Fact is, Jesse James, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to you, and so because of that I’m going to do you a big favour here and pretend none of this gun business ever happened. I’ve seen it all, me, and I know where trouble lies deepest and where it blows away on the first wind. And bear in mind I’m talking about your trouble here, boy, not mine.’

  Devlin lowered the rifle. ‘It’s not even six o’clock,’ he said.

  ‘Ten past. What’s that got to do with anything? Besides, best time of day for this kind of work. You have worked out, I suppose, that I’m here on behalf of Harrap to evict you.’

  ‘Evict?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, son. Even you know what that means. And if you don’t, then you’ve seen it written out often enough over these past few months to know what was coming. You’re out.’ He gest
ured at the rundown farmhouse. ‘By order of the Court. Old man Harrap wrote to you about your arrears. I wrote to you about your arrears, and then the County Court wrote to you about your arrears.’

  ‘Harrap said when he rented me the place that I’d get good pasture on the bottom half,’ Devlin said. ‘I was going to let it on.’ It was a pointless, futile argument, and he knew this before he’d finished speaking.

  ‘Not my problem,’ Skelton said. ‘Besides, look at you. Since when were you a farmer? None of you Devlins were ever farmers. You might have played at it, once, but that’s all. What, you think good pasture just grows and the money pours in on the back of a bit of cutting now and then?’

  ‘Harrap said—’

  ‘Don’t matter one jot what Harrap did or didn’t say. You were the one who signed the lease on the place and he’s the one still shy five months’ rent.’

  ‘I was going to pay him—’

  ‘When the cows came home. You already said.’

  Beyond the man, in the lorry, the woman slid heavily from her seat on to the running board and then to the ground. ‘Just tell him to go, and have done with it,’ she shouted to her husband.

  ‘She’s right,’ Skelton said. ‘I’m not here to argue the toss. I’m here because I’ve got a legal duty to throw you out and then to retrieve goods to cover all costs and—’

  ‘Costs? What costs?’

  ‘“What costs?” he says. What costs? Well, for a start there’s the unpaid rent, then there’s the costs of the Court, the costs of old man Harrap’s solicitor’s clerk, and then my costs in coming all this way out here to waste my fucking breath in telling you all this and to carry out my legal, Court-sanctioned duties. All of which, incidentally, you would already have known if you’d opened even one of them fucking letters.’

  Devlin considered all this. He had known it was coming, but had not expected it to come at six o’clock on a summer’s morning. He usually woke around eleven and got up an hour or two later.

  Skelton’s wife came to him. She wore heels and walked unsteadily over the cobbled yard.

  ‘Why don’t he put that thing right down?’ she said, nodding to the rifle Devlin still held.

  ‘He won’t fire it,’ Skelton said. ‘Peacetime hero, that’s all he is.’

  The rifle felt like a toy in Devlin’s hands.

  ‘He’s let the place go something rotten,’ the woman said. She looked around her and pulled a face at everything she saw.

  Lines of tall grass and overgrown nettles and dock grew along every building. Windows were broken. The door hung off the barn, and its tile roof sagged along its entire length.

  ‘Too busy shooting rabbits, probably,’ Skelton said.

  ‘Since when was he a farmer?’ the woman said. ‘None of them Devlins ever amounted to anything.’

  ‘We already done that bit,’ Skelton said.

  Devlin thought he detected a note of lukewarm sympathy in the man’s voice.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to the cab?’ Skelton said to his wife. ‘Me and Al Capone here just need a few words in private.’

  The remark angered the woman. She started walking away, but then stopped and turned back to face them. She looked directly at Devlin and grinned.

  ‘I only came to see what this one looked like,’ she said, her smile growing. ‘You do realize that this was the mouthy little bastard that knocked up Mary Collet’s youngest, Barbara. Kid was born two months back, a girl.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ Skelton said. ‘Don’t look as though he’s got it in him. You sure? She’s ripe enough, I’ll give you that. Word is, she gets about a bit. Flighty. It could be anybody’s.’

  ‘She’s lying,’ Devlin said.

  ‘You watch your mouth,’ Skelton said.

  ‘Not her,’ Devlin said. ‘The Collet girl. And that bitch of a mother. Besides, it wasn’t me. Last I heard, it was a man from Wisbech way. You seen the colour of my hair, my eyes? Well? You want to take a closer look at the kid. Pound to a penny neither of you got the first idea about its eyes.’

  A baby girl. Two months. The first Devlin had heard.

  Skelton and his wife exchanged a glance.

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Skelton said.

  ‘It’s science,’ Devlin said. ‘The eye-colour thing. Medical. You want to get your facts straight before you start accusing people of things.’

  Skelton took out a cloth and wiped his face. Then he held open the jacket he wore to reveal a brown envelope.

  What else was it Devlin’s mother used to say? And if it is bad news arriving before noon, then it’ll come in brown.

  ‘This is for me to give to you.’ Skelton pushed the envelope into Devlin’s free hand.

  ‘Telling me what?’

  ‘Telling you what you’ve long since known and expected. Besides, I know all about you – I make it my business. You’re a man who won’t be told.’ He flicked the envelope. ‘It’s to inform you that I’ve been here and that I’ve carried out my designated duty and kicked you out on your arse.’

  ‘And all the other stuff?’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘“Goods to the value” stuff.’

  ‘I’ll take whatever I can find and then let those bastards at the Lynn auction house sell it off cheap to everybody who knows what you’ve been up to here these past months.’

  It had never been Devlin’s intention to become a farmer. All he’d wanted was somewhere to live and to settle himself for a few months. He’d known the day he’d arrived at the place – a walk of two miles from the nearest bus stop; one service a day except Sundays in either direction – that nothing would ever come of it. And he’d been proved right.

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said, motioning to the building behind him.

  ‘Oh, there’s always something,’ Skelton said. ‘I took all the clothes from a defaulter in Whaplode last week. Rag value. Just about covered the diesel, but it was something.’ He looked around him at the dilapidated buildings. ‘You’ve probably got some bits and pieces of equipment worth a few quid to somebody.’

  ‘All here when I came,’ Devlin said. ‘Harrap’s.’

  Skelton spat again, waving a hand at the corn flies gathering close to his face. ‘I thought the old bastard was just that little bit too keen to get you out.’

  ‘What?’ his wife said.

  ‘Told me we could sort out all the reimbursements later.’

  ‘You could have this,’ Devlin said, raising the rifle.

  ‘That? Scrap metal. Besides, I got a box full of real guns and rifles already.’

  ‘Go in and have a look round if you don’t believe me,’ Devlin said. ‘I brought nothing with me. Nothing to bring.’

  It was a victory, of sorts, and for the first time during their encounter, Devlin felt pleased with himself.

  ‘He thinks he’s got one over on you,’ Skelton’s wife said. ‘And I’m telling you here and now – Mary Collet will swear in a Court of Law that he’s the father.’

  But that was the mother, not the daughter, and Devlin sensed his second small victory.

  ‘And once she knows you’re out on your ear,’ the woman went on, ‘she’ll send one of her boys – or perhaps all three of them – to keep you moving on. By all accounts, you’re a nasty little piece of work and nobody will shed any tears when you pack up and disappear.’

  Devlin raised the barrel of the rifle until it was pointing at her face.

  ‘You should have left her at home,’ he said to Skelton. ‘Where she belongs.’

  ‘You going to let him talk to me like that?’ the woman said.

  ‘I was talking to him,’ Devlin said.

  Skelton rubbed his unshaved chin and sighed. ‘You know where all this is going, boy?’

  ‘No, you tell me. Where is all this going?’

  ‘Well, the way things stand, straight back to the Court and the magistrate who signed Harrap’s eviction order in the first place. One thing you should have le
arned by now – you don’t ever get to turn your back on debt. I suppose that comes of you being a Devlin. And before anything even gets anywhere near the magistrate, it goes first to the police over in Boston, Spalding and Lynn. You don’t know it, but you just made everything that much worse for yourself. There’s always something to seize against a debt.’

  ‘The police?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Now he’s listening,’ the woman said. ‘Now you’ve got his attention.’

  ‘What have they got to do with anything?’ Devlin said. ‘You said it was between me and Harrap.’

  ‘Never said any such thing. You owe money. And if there’s something else that should have penetrated that thick skull of yours by now, then it’s the simple fact that the law is always on the side of money and them what has it and them what’s owed it. Always has been, always will be. Harrap’s got it and he’s owed it. And he’s got some big friends, that man.’

  ‘The law won’t waste its time on me,’ Devlin said.

  Skelton laughed. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised what they waste their time on.’ His face was slick with sweat again. ‘Look, we’re the only ones wasting time here. You just pay me something on account – one month’s rent, say – and all this can be pushed back into the paperwork. I’ll stick my claim in to Harrap and then he can take it back to the Court. Pay nothing and we’re all on a different path completely. Pay nothing and even if—’

  ‘Assault with a deadly weapon,’ the woman shouted suddenly, surprising them both.

  ‘What?’ Devlin said.

  ‘You heard me. You’re still waving the thing around. Always gets them moving a bit faster – the police and the Courts – if there are one or two other charges to tack on, especially charges concerning weapons.’

  ‘I haven’t even fired it,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Not the point. You still threatened us both with it.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Skelton said, seeming to surprise himself with the word in Devlin’s defence.

  Angry at the woman’s interventions, especially after all she’d said before, and now that the encounter was surely coming to its end, Devlin raised the rifle and jabbed it towards her.

  Uncertain what was happening, Skelton said, ‘Don’t be stupid, son. You got all the letters. Truth be told, you probably even read them and started to work things out. You brought all this on yourself. The last thing you want to be doing now is waving that thing in people’s faces. Ask me, you’re your own worst enemy.’