Farewell Gesture

by Roger Ormerod

  But he was silent and thoughtful for the rest of the way into town.

  I dropped him in the square. For a moment I thought he was going to forget his intention to return to Sumbury. But no.

  “Give me a ring when you’re ready to go back,” he said, holding the door open. He found a stump of pencil in his pocket, an old cash-till receipt in another, and wrote something on it. “Here. The phone number of Sam’s Caff. They’ll know where I am. Don’t forget.”

  He was back on form. I promised not to forget him, and drove on. Sam’s Caff. They would know. Not his home. I couldn’t decide whether to be amused by his flip brashness or feel sorry for him. He was an insignificant predator in a world of slavering lions.

  Seven

  My approach to Phil’s place had to be made cautiously. Frenchie’s body must surely have been found hours before, and the police net would be out. Time was closing in on me, though they couldn’t have known the location of Phil’s flat unless they’d managed to trace her. The odds were well in my favour, but all the same I cruised past a couple of times before I risked the drive entrance and parked outside the front door. I still had her keys.

  Again the house was quiet, but today the furniture polish smell was overlaid with a cigar tang. Three other families lived there, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. People could die and nobody’d know for weeks. Silently, I mounted the stairs to the flat.

  I should have gone through the place when I had the chance. I’d certainly had the opportunity, but at that time I’d had reservations. Not now. It was clear that I hadn’t known much about Phil, and I needed to know more. I got out the key ring she’d given me and let myself in. At once, before the door had shut behind me, I knew that somebody had been there.

  When you spend five solid days shut up in a flat you get to know every item around you. Now, there were minimal changes, a stool a foot from where I remembered it, the door to the bathroom shut when I hadn’t closed it. I stood very still. The silence was oppressive.

  Quietly, I opened the door behind me, went out, and closed it again. I’d heard it said that you can open a cylinder lock with a piece of thin celluloid (loid it, they’d said in the nick) or even a credit card. But that works only with a loosely fitted door. You couldn’t have slid a razor blade in the crack of this one. I examined the frame, and there were no marks of force having been used.

  So Phil had been home. She had seen me at Aubrey Wise’s place—had perhaps even heard me—waited until I was clear, then driven like hell for Killingham. Whatever I might have found before, it would not be there now, not if it had any meaning for me. In the bathroom she’d left the scent of bath oil. That smell was the only thing personal, and there was nothing else.

  In the kitchen I discovered she’d eaten one of the frozen dinners I had left in the fridge. I turned on the cooker and prepared to cook the other. She hadn’t thought to water her plants so I did it for her.

  I said she hadn’t left anything, by which I meant accidentally. On the Formica surface of her tiny kitchen table there was a note for me.

  Paul,

  I’m certain you’ll come back here to see what you can find, so I’ve had to make sure there’s nothing. I don’t want you in Sumbury. Please stay here at the flat, and I’ll phone you when I can. I can assure you, it is far from finished.

  Phil

  While I sat and ate I read it over again. She had written it on half of an A4 sheet of notepaper, folded and torn roughly. Idly, I turned it over.

  Oh, Phil! So much energy expended on keeping me in ignorance, and you had to go and make such a mistake! The notepaper bore a printed heading and phone numbers, but it clearly had not been something sent to her. There was nothing else on that half but the heading, and nobody starts a letter halfway down the page. She had carefully torn the sheet in half, to keep the heading from my sight, and then left me the wrong half. Somewhere in her shoulder-bag she would now have a screwed-up ball of blank paper. It had, before being torn, been a sheet of her own printed notepaper.

  The heading was: WISEMANN AGENCY, 3rd Floor, 37 Parkin Road, Killingham. The phone number was: Killingham 7397. Out of hours: Killingham 5964.

  The number of the phone on the tall table beside Phil’s front door was Killingham 5964.

  Wisemann, I thought. The Wise part of it was obvious, but was the Mann part of it a partner? Or herself? She’d said she worked alone, so the latter was more likely. If the name Wise was not her own, and evidence was growing that it couldn’t be, then perhaps Mann was. But that got me not one jot or tittle further. If she was known in Killingham as Wise, she would not also be known as Mann.

  After I’d finished eating I looked round the flat, wondering if I’d be seeing it again, then left. The door closed on an episode in my life.

  Killingham was not my home town, and though I’d spent some time scouting round it I was still uncertain of its precise geography. I’d never heard of Parkin Road. I took the car into town and left it in a multi-storey and bought a street map. On a bench in the shopping precinct, I studied it. Parkin Road was on the poorer side of the town centre, not far from where I was sitting at that moment. I decided I could walk to it.

  At that end of town they were demolishing slums. Already there was a new bus terminal, and the street flanking it, which was marked as a narrow thoroughfare on my out-of-date map, was now part of the new ring road. Parkin Road had crossed this street, but was now cut by the ring road into two halves, Parkin Road East and Parkin Road West. I explored the eastern half first. No Number 37. Across a foot-bridge I went, and down into a row of dirty old terraces waiting anxiously for the bulldozer and nearly fit to beat it to it. A few of the houses, judging by the dusty lace curtains, still housed residents.

  Tucked away amongst all this there was a tight, narrow door with the number 37 on it. The lock was new. There was a recently painted board: WISEMANN AGENCY. If you required a private enquiry agency, and you didn’t intend to dig too deeply into your pocket, this was where you would come.

  There was a second cylinder lock key on the ring Phil had given me, that and two small flat ones. I tried the key that wasn’t for her flat, and it didn’t fit. This was a set-back I hadn’t expected.

  I crossed the road. Traffic hummed along the ring road but nobody drove along Parkin Road West. I stood on the far pavement and looked across. Third floor. Counting the ground floor as number one, the third-floor window looked just as dirty as the others, way up there under the guttering. I wondered how it would be possible to get round to the back.

  There was no access at all from the ring road end, so I tried in the other direction. There was a five-ways junction there and more traffic. An active garage used one whole corner, and on another was an easy-fit exhaust and tyre service. Running back along the rear of Parkin Road was an alleyway. I strolled along it.

  The surface was cobbled, and on one side there was a rudimentary pavement of blue bricks, a yard wide. On the opposite side to this, the Parkin Road side, there was a six-foot wall, just too high for me to see over without jumping. From the pavement I could see the tops of the buildings, which were far enough back from the wall to indicate that the space had been gardens or rear yards when Parkin Road had first opened its welcoming arms to residents. How they must have rushed in delight through the pristine, cramped homes, exclaiming in awe at the water available simply by turning a tap, at the gas lamps, the outside toilet. Now all that glory was gone. A ring road, bearing modern-day facilities, had sliced Parkin Road in half with a shrug of disdain.

  Doors were set at regular intervals in the wall, each with a small bricked arch over it. They bore numbers, but most had eroded. I found 25, then 33, and counted two more to 37. The paint had been green. I probed a finger through the hole, but there was no latch to lift. So I pushed, and it gave slowly against a bank of riotous nettles. I thrust my way in far enough to shut the door behind me, and considered the prospects.

  The blind rears stared at me impassively. Most of
the windows were boarded up. The garden space to Number 37 was choked with weeds—nettles, thistles, and a clutch of bramble. What looked as though it could have been a rambler rose clung to a side wall. A linepost leaned limply. Someone had once hung washing out there.

  It was possible to detect where the path had been by the thinner growth. I thrust my way through it, past the end privy, the coal-house, the kitchen, all on the right in a line. Here I faced what had been a window, and was now solidly planked over. To my right was the back door, next to the kitchen window, which still retained its glass. Nobody had used the door for years. It was solid, had the keyhole of an ancient and probably rusted deadlock, and was apparently sealed by old paint and the accumulation of filth.

  I stared at the barrier facing me, and turned away defeated. There had been a phone number for this place, so Phil must have used it for something.

  On the way back to my car I passed a post office, and checked in their phone directory. To my surprise Sam’s Caff was listed exactly as it sounded. It was apparently a transport café, out on the Markham road, which had been the main route north before the motorway cut its throat.

  I dug out my car and drove there. It was just as I’d expected, a broken-down one-storey building, fronted by a parking patch and the concrete bases from which petrol pumps had once sprouted. Now only two ramshackle cars and a clutch of fast motorcycles decorated the frontage. It was the haunt of bikers and out-of-workers, killing time with endless cups of tea and meaningless chatter.

  I pushed open the door, assailed by the beat of a jukebox and the screams of female pillionists. Sam might once have been fat, but was now thin and lugubrious, with the fluff of a moustache high on his upper lip, like a little furry animal seeking refuge up his nose.

  “Tea,” I said.

  “Do you a beefburger?” He was pitifully eager.

  “Later maybe. Is Art in?”

  He nodded towards a far corner.

  I had not expected to find him alone, and he was not. There were half a dozen of them round the table, which was cluttered with empty cups and saucers. Sam was clinging to his standards and holding on to the saucers. All of them were dressed in Art’s style, the loose cotton jackets, sweat shirts, and denim jeans. They were not bikers. Put them all together and you wouldn’t find a finger honest enough to operate a clutch lever.

  I took my tea over to the table. There was a scattering of empty crisp packets, a tray full of cigarette stubs, and a smell of cannabis. Nobody looked up.

  “Room for one more?”

  Art raised his head at my voice. “Already? Thought you’d phone. Move over there, Ken. Let the man in.”

  Ken moved with reluctance. He looked as though he accomplished nothing without a sullen consideration. I slid my tea on to the table surface, where fortunately it was at once lost, and sat down.

  “It isn’t finished yet,” I told Art. “How’re you at breaking and entering?”

  There was an abrupt, brittle silence. I smiled around the set faces. Art said: “It’s okay. This character’s from Gartree.” Art had, apparently, ready access to all the facts.

  They relaxed. There was a softening of the expressions towards respect. I was still kept at a distance, but now it was because of my higher status. Sheer snobbery.

  “What y’ got in mind?” Art asked.

  “The rear entrance of a house in Parkin Road West. Know it?” He nodded. “It’s now offices, or pretending to be. I want to get in.”

  Art was all professionalism now. You’d have thought it was the Bank of England. But he had to show me what a big gun he was amongst all these little pistols of the criminal fraternity, how attentive he was to detail.

  “What’re we after?” he asked at the end. “A safe? Could need a couple of guys…” His eyes went round the table. There was a general show of interest.

  “We’re not going to take anything,” I said. “Where shall we meet?”

  We arranged the meeting at the open end of the alleyway behind Parkin Road West at nine. It would be good and dark by then. He said he would bring the necessary equipment.

  I left, and went back to the flat to fill in time, and in case she phoned. She did not.

  At nine I was waiting for Art. He slid to my side from the shadows, dressed for the part in somebody else’s black donkey jacket. What he had brought along for the job was a torch and a crowbar. This was clearly going to be a delicate job.

  I found the wall door without difficulty because I hadn’t been able to close it completely. He plodded after me through the undergrowth, the town glow in the sky being sufficient at that stage. Along the whole row of buildings there was not one lighted window.

  We reached the rear door. “Hold the torch,” said Art. “Shield it with your hand. That’s it.”

  Art was calm and practical. He thumped the claw end of his crowbar into the jamb of the door opposite the lock, forced it in further, then put his weight behind it. There was a crack, the door creaked open, and we stepped over a little heap of rotted wood on the ground.

  I threw the torchlight around. We were in the kitchen, narrow, with all the equipment in a line beneath the window. There was an old black cooker and an earthenware sink with a wooden draining board, a small table beyond it. The table had an oilcloth top. On it was a brown pottery teapot, beside that a clean cup and saucer, and a stainless steel sugar bowl. There was milk in a bottle, but it seemed yellow, and when I tilted it the surface swayed rather than moved. I picked up the cup. It was Crown Derby. On the cooker there was a tin kettle.

  The kitchen was still in use. Phil took milk and sugar in her tea, but she hadn’t done so recently.

  “Let’s find the stairs,” I said.

  We climbed. The treads seemed secure, but the higher we went the more flimsy was the stair rail.

  There was only one door from the landing on the third floor. A visiting card was thumbtacked to it: WISEMANN AGENCY. That was in case anybody ever came here, which I was beginning to doubt. The lock on the door was new. It was another cylinder lock. I tried the second key, and it worked. The door opened.

  “You don’t need me,” said Art gloomily.

  Oh, but I did. It was comforting to have him at my shoulder. For one moment I wondered about this, why I felt I could trust him, why I needed him. Then I gave my full attention to the room.

  There was no denying that this was intended to be an office, though a very rudimentary one. There was a desk with a chair behind it and a phone on it. There was no visitor’s chair, no desk lamp, no typewriter, no tape recorder, no pictures to break up the tattered expanses of the walls, no framed diploma signed by Philip Marlowe. There was a filing cabinet against the side wall. I saw it all in one sweep of the torch.

  “Watch what you’re doing with that!” whispered Art.

  “No need to whisper. Let’s see if the blind works.”

  He went over to the single narrow window, which overlooked the street. The blind was an old roller type. It pulled down raggedly, but the ratchet didn’t work, so he tied the cord to the radiator beneath it. I put on the light.

  “Go easy, can’t y’!” he croaked, not so much the master crook now.

  “Who’ll trouble, around here?” I was short with him. Disappointment at the sparsity of information I was uncovering was reflecting in my voice. “Perhaps there’s something in the cabinet.” I had intended this as a thought, but it came out as words.

  In the corner the light was dim. Hopefully, Art hefted his crowbar. “Hold it,” I told him. “Let’s try these keys first.”

  I was referring to the small flat ones, which were just the sort of thing for cabinets. The second one worked the trick. The four sliding drawers were all accessible.

  There was nothing in any of them, except the little cotton bag in which the keys had been tied.

  I pushed them shut and relocked them. Either she used this office as nothing more than an accommodation address (but in which case why did she need a phone?) or she actually co
nducted some of her work from this place. Perhaps the error in using the letter-headed half of the sheet for her note had not, in fact, been a mistake. She had cleared out her office and deliberately led me to it. But…to find nothing?

  I felt a stir of anger, a tingle of unease.

  “There’s still the desk,” I said, more in self-encouragement than anything else. But that would surely be cleared out too.

  All the same, I went round to the other side and sat on the hard wooden chair, lifted the phone and discovered it was connected, and replaced it. There was a knee-hole, on each side of it a set of drawers. One set was unlocked. I went through them. Nothing but standard office equipment. There was a desk diary, the only entries in it being cryptic. Phone to confirm. Due date for receipt. Rates. Things like that as reminders.

  I looked to the other set of drawers, which were locked. But my magic last key did the trick.

  In the top drawer nothing. In the next one, half a bar of chocolate and a box of tissues. In the bottom one, two items.

  One was a passport. I took it out, laid it on the desk surface, and opened it. There was a photograph, recognisable as Phil, though her hair had been longer and blond, and the usual endorsements, which could have been for holidays abroad or business trips. And there was her name. Dorothy June Mann.

  There could be no doubt that this had been left for me to find. A passport is something a person would most certainly remove. It was a confidence. It was a seal of some complicity into which we had, presumably, entered. Uneasily, I wondered what that might be. I put it back where it’d come from.

  The other item in the drawer was a different proposition altogether. I stared down at it for a few seconds before I reached down. It was a small automatic pistol.

  Gingerly I lifted it out and put it on the desk where I could get a good look at it. Art said, “Cor blimey!” and took a pace forward.

  I am relatively ignorant of weaponry, never having handled such a thing, though in Gartree you’re exposed to a certain amount of discussion on the subject. I know there are pistols, sometimes called handguns, and that this covers two categories, the revolver and the automatic pistol, which in fact is only semi-automatic. This one, not having a cylinder to revolve, was therefore an automatic pistol, and probably of the calibre which I’d heard called a thirty-two. There was supposed to be a safety catch. This was the first thing I looked for. It was on the side, just above the handgrip. It was at the “on” position, so I therefore felt safe in handling the thing. There should have been a clip at the bottom of the hand-grip. There was. I released it, and the magazine slid out into my other hand. It held a full load of cartridges. Seven. I found the slide and pulled it back. There wasn’t one in the chamber.