Roxie shrugged.
‘Something sharp cut the pocket lining. Lost a kitchen knife, have you, Roxie?’
Roxie looked sullen.
‘Threaten you with it, did he, Roxie? Where’s your daughter, Roxie? Sent her away, haven’t you? Threaten her with the knife, if you talked, did he?’
Roxie found her voice. ‘Shut up, you.’
Sergeant Henley gave the Inspector a quick triumphant glance. ‘I think I could make a guess where your daughter is, and probably so could he. I know where your aunt lives. He’s better caught. Tell us where he is then, Roxie.’
Roxie set her mouth firmly in silence. It looked like the edge of a knife itself.
Sergeant Henley said, without noticeable kindness: ‘If I were you, Roxie, I’d get your daughter home. She’d be better off with you than that drunken aunt of yours. Mrs Bow, she is now, isn’t she? Her husband’s none too safe with little girls, or hasn’t anyone told you that?’
After a short pause, Roxie muttered: ‘Remember he’s a little rat that likes a hole.’
‘Oh, come on, that’s not good enough. No puzzlers.’ Paul Lane was cold. ‘You say what you mean in plain English.’
Sergeant Henley said: ‘Speak up now. Or Uncle Bow might find himself doing a lifer for your Rosie.’
Roxie said suddenly, ‘There’s a tunnel down by the river. I don’t know where. You’d have to find it. Greenwich Pier. He used to play in it years ago. In the war.’
Years ago, thought Paul Lane, I suppose it’s still there. Well, she thinks it is, anyway.
Thanks, Roxie,’ he said, and pulled the telephone towards him.
When he had given his orders and they were alone, he said: ‘You were rough on her, Phyllis.’
‘But I got a result. And I’ll tell you something else: what really frightened Roxie was that the kid might cooperate with Uncle Bow.’
Lane shrugged. He was never sure how to take his Phyllis.
‘It’s been known,’ said Phyllis.
The message about the tunnel went to John Coffin, who got into touch with the Port of London Authority and the Greenwich Pier management for information and, better still, maps.
‘No picnic, searching down there,’ said the man at the end of the telephone. ‘Do my best for you, but sometimes we don’t know what we’ve got ourselves.’
Next morning in Queen Charlotte’s Alley, Sarah Fleming was preparing a picnic for her brother Peter. She was doing so reluctantly, it was her Poly day and she really did not have time. The little ones, the very little ones, called it her ‘Holy day’, not distinguishing clearly between Poly and Holy. Sarah wondered if they were deaf in addition to other deficiencies. Growing deafer, moreover, as they had certainly not been deaf as babies. Putting all their energies into deafness rather than growing bigger and taller. It was the sort of fantasy she must not harbour.
‘I’ve given you ham and cucumber. And there’s a Thermos of coffee.’
‘It ought to be smoked salmon and champagne for her,’ said Peter. He was dressed ready for his outing in clean jeans and a white shirt. Sarah wore almost the same clothes, except that her shirt was red. A gesture to her political feelings.
‘She’s only a kid.’
‘That’s the sort of girl she is.’ He saw himself as a great, strong animal who could always protect his girl. A bear?
‘Count yourself lucky I didn’t make you Marmite sandwiches.’
‘There ought to be wine and music and a boat on the river,’ he said dreamily.
‘And you in a white tie and tails, I suppose.’ They had recently watched an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film on the television in which she thought she saw the source of his fantasy.
‘What about work? Aren’t you going in?’
He had a part-time job in a large firm of chemists where he worked in the stockrooms. There had been rumours of redundancies.
‘Got the day off. Had it due. Sal … do you think I could do what you are doing? Work for my A’s and then go to university?’
‘Well I’ve had my turn, only right you should have yours,’ said Sarah judicially. ‘I don’t know about the little ones, though. I certainly can’t take them to Oxford with me. I was relying on you.’
They both looked at their younger brothers and sisters, who stared blankly back.
‘I could take them out to the middle of a lake in a boat and drop them in. They can’t swim. I have taken that precaution.’
‘I never know when you are serious or not.’
‘And I never know with you,’ she answered.
There was a pause, broken by the girl.
‘You’d have to stop playing games.’
‘I don’t play games.’
Sarah shrugged.
‘I’d manage.’ He looked hopeful. ‘Fix something up. I might go to night school or something. Or the Open University.’
‘You’d have to work at your grades.’ His sister was at once more realistic and more perceptive. ‘You’ve never been much of an exam passer.’ Very poor, in fact, but no point in discouraging him. Another dream, though. He had so many. She saw him passing the day in a cloud of dreams.
‘You mean why bother?’ he said, seeing more than she had meant him to. ‘I want to be as good as them, the Pitts. Look at what they are and what we are. What we’ve got and what they’ve got. It’s not right. Things ought to be more equal.’
‘We’re what we are and they are what they are.’ For various reasons, intellectual, historical and sexual, it was easier for her to accept things as they were than for Peter.
Round the corner in No 22, Church Row, Irene Pitt was watching her daughter prepare for a picnic.
‘Sure you want to go?’
‘Got to.’
Irene raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s not the way to enjoy yourself. If that’s what you are going to do, of course.’
‘I promised.’
‘Is that a bottle of wine?’
‘I thought we could use it.’
‘Want any fruit? There’s a pineapple in the refrigerator. Brie? I bought a nice wedge yesterday. Plenty if you want it. I’m going out to lunch myself.’ With Chris, of course.
‘Just the wine.’
They were in the kitchen, Irene still in a dressing-gown, an ivory frilled cotton to which she gave a golden glow, and Nona in jeans with a white shirt. Edward had gone off to see an editor at the BBC; he wanted to talk about a project on the Third World, and the boy was at school.
‘How did you get the day off from school?’ Irene slipped a few rich chocolates in a plastic bag and gave them to her daughter.
‘The sixth form can work at home.’ She looked at her mother. ‘All right, this isn’t work, but it’s a goodbye session.’ Or it would be, if she could get Peter to understand. ‘I told you. So it’s only once.’
Irene laughed. ‘We always think that. It’s not so easy saying goodbye.’
‘Breaking things up? No, I know that. A lot of things are breaking up now.’
‘You mean because of Chris and me. Do you mind? But that’s silly. Of course you mind.’
‘Yes, I do. Who will I stay with, you or Dad?’
‘I suppose you will choose. You know that. We agreed.’ The divorce had been talked over thoroughly in New York, or so she had thought. Now she wondered. But goodness knows, Nona had had her say there.
Nona looked around the kitchen. ‘I might stay here. Just might. I’d want to go on seeing you a lot, though.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t be sharp. It’s one of your worst things.’
‘Is that why you’ve never told me before what happened with you and Peter before we all went to New York? Did you think I’d be sharp? I wouldn’t have been. But I think you wanted me to know. You let me read that story you wrote for your class magazine: The Dragon’s Mouth. That was really you and Peter finding that thing in the wood, wasn’t it?’
‘Might have been.’
‘Might?’
‘Was, then.’
‘It frightened me that you had not told me. Made it important, very real.’
Nona shrugged.
‘All the same, you didn’t hand out many details. You made it a kind of fable. But there was a real incident, I know.’
Nona still kept quiet. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I promised.’
Irene would have gone on, but for the arrival of Mrs Brocklebank.
She surveyed Nona and her preparation for a picnic. ‘Off out? It’s going to rain.’
‘It won’t rain.’ Nona slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘Thanks for the chocs. Anyway, we’re going to see the Cutty Sark.’
‘A lot of police down there. You’re not supposed to see them, but you can. All over the place like rabbits.’
‘Who cares?’ Nona picked up the wine bottle, gave her mother a look and was gone.
Mrs Brocklebank had created a little nest for herself in the basement where she put her clothes and her big black handbag, from which she was only rarely and reluctantly parted, and where she tucked away any odds and ends it was better Brock at home did not see. Money was one. A woman was entitled to her own savings. She had such nests in every one of her working places, which her employers were only vaguely aware of. She had a kind of natural skill in camouflage.
Now she went to her corner next to which was a cupboard no one seemed to know about except Mrs Brocklebank, shared by her and a certain amount of animal life, and deposited her bag and coat. There was a small mirror hanging on the door in which she combed her hair; a woman liked to look her best even at work.
She was troubled and anxious. ‘As though one death wasn’t enough,’ she said to herself. ‘There’s got to be others, by the look of it. And they say there’s nothing wrong with this house and I’m imagining things.’
She had been a childhood friend of William Egan and though no one could truly mourn such a man of violence, still she had her loyalties, and he was a man who had known how to trade on them.
Later that day she would pop in, her words, to see Roxie Farmer in Abinger Road; she knew her too.
‘Roxie,’ she would say, ‘every one of us has to look after their own. It’s our duty, and you and I have done it. Me in my way, you in yours. But that Terry of yours has put himself beyond it. I reckon I know where he is as well as you do, and I might have to say. If he gets killed, he’s got only himself to blame.’
All the same, she wished she had been stronger in her advice to Nona not to go down by the Cutty Sark. She had been too indirect, she should have said: Look love, this is old Brocklebank speaking straight. It could be dangerous down there.
She got out her scrubbing brush. ‘I’ll just give the front step a scrub. I didn’t like the look of it at all this morning.’
The police and picnickers converged upon the river. Peter and Nona were not the only people planning to eat in the open air, because a coachload of school-children together with four teachers, all carrying packed lunches, had arrived to visit the Cutty Sark and then Gypsy Moth in its dry dock.
‘Lot of people about. Too many.’ It wasn’t what Peter had had in mind when he had thought of the picnic. Something more pastoral and solitary had been his vision.
‘Some of them are policemen, I think. Mrs Brocklebank said so.’ Nona looked about her with interest, trying to identify which of the young men in her vicinity could possibly be policemen. ‘There has been a murder, you know. They are looking for clues, I suppose. And for the murderer.’
‘I know. I don’t want to talk about it.’ He gripped her arm. ‘Come on. There’s a lot of things I want to show you.’
‘Yes, and I want to see. I am very interested. I like objects, I’ve discovered that recently. But don’t hold me so tight.’
He had once been the leader and she had been the unquestioning follower, but all that had changed now. Surely he could see it.
He did not seem to have heard. ‘Quickly now. First the Cutty Sark and then we’ll explore down by the river. Then our picnic on the hill by the Old Observatory.’
But when they were in the clipper Nona took a more detailed interest than he did. She was fascinated by the Saloon, set out for dinner with silver and glass; she hovered over the display of figureheads; but it was the rigging of the clipper that caught her imagination most. She stood at the foot of the mainmast, staring up at the intricacy of the complicated tracery of sails, spars and rope.
‘You know why it is called the Cutty Sark?’
‘Just a name.’ Peter was not interested. ‘Had to call it something.’
‘It’s from Robert Burns’s poem Tam o’ Shanter. It’s about a witch who chased him on his mare. The Cutty Sark is the little shift or chemise the witch was wearing.’
‘Funny name.’
‘It probably comes from the French word sacque, that was a kind of loose blouse. It must mean the pronunciation was nearer to sark than sack.’
‘Or at least in Scotland.’ He turned away. He hated being instructed. ‘Anyway, it’s not a bad name for a ship. I suppose it means she went like a witch.’
The vessel was getting crowded now as another school party arrived. Nona would have lingered, looking at the fo’c’sle where the crew had slept, and the galley where the food was prepared, but he hurried her on.
‘Let’s go down to the pier. I want to show you something.’
The two of them were noticed and observed by at least two policemen. One was a young detective-constable, seconded from the Bromley district, who noticed Nona. He thought she was beautiful. He considered trying to make her acquaintance, but two things moved against it. First, he was on a job, and secondly, he knew without putting into words that she was no girlfriend for an ambitious copper. There was a third thing: he had caught sight of a superior officer: John Coffin.
Coffin was the other police officer who saw them. He gave the pair a friendly glance as they walked towards the riverside.
He was here checking up on the search for Terry Place. The feeling was the hunt was going well; they would find him.
Earlier that morning, speaking on the telephone, Paul Lane had said, ‘With the number of men we have searching he can’t get away. Not if he’s in the area, and everything tells me he is.’
‘He could stay in hiding a long while before we flushed him out.’ No one knew better than John Coffin what a network of alleys, underground passages, and dark basements nestling in old buildings still lay near the river.
‘Not the way I see it.’ Lane had been positive in his usual clear-minded manner. One did not use the word cocky of such as Paul Lane, but it did cross Coffin’s mind, if in no unfriendly spirit. He had been cocky himself once, and none the worse for it now. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’ That was the other side of the coin with the Inspector. He might be strong in his own opinions but he did not go haring off on his own. He kept in touch.
A young plain clothes man touched his arm. ‘Inspector Lane is looking for you, sir. He’s over there in his car.’
Coffin turned his back to the pier, Peter and Nona had already disappeared down a flight of steps, and walked towards the road, where a line of police vehicles was drawn up.
Lane sprang out of the first car at his approach. ‘We’ve got him, sir.’
‘Good. Where?’
‘Get in, and we’ll go there. Forget the river. I reckon Roxie was leading us on there. Now we place him in a house. Up the hill, more towards Charlton way. Not down here by the river as we thought, after all. He always was a cunning beggar, and Roxie’s another one.’
As the car travelled up the hill in Greenwich Park, Lane explained. ‘He was sighted by a local man on the beat, was at school with him, is sure it’s Terry.’
‘You mean you haven’t actually got your hands on him?’
‘He was seen going into a house in Maryon Park Gardens. It’s a street his sister admits he knew, had a girlfriend there. And he’s not answering the door or coming out. It has to be Place.’
T
hey drew up before one of a pair of red brick semi-detached houses in a street of other houses like it.
‘And this is it?’ Coffin studied the neat quiet house with a plot of garden in the front. ‘Who’s the house owner?’
‘Neighbours say it’s an old chap called Masterton. He’s in hospital. He’s had lodgers in and out.’
There was another police car at the kerb, with a woman sitting in the back. Coffin studied her face. She looked unhappy.
‘That’s Place’s sister, Roxie Farmer. We got her down here.’ He turned towards Coffin. ‘So what now? Do we go in?’
‘No.’ Coffin sat back. ‘Not yet. We wait.’
Nona and Peter wandered by the river, with Peter pointing out the various features that interested him. Nona stared at the grey river where the wind was picking up little waves and throwing them against the walls of the river walk.
‘Do you ever think about that thing that happened to us in the park? Before I went away. Do you think about it?’
‘A long while ago now, Nona.’
‘It was horrible.’ She shivered.
‘Animals die in the open air.’ He stroked her arm. ‘It’s natural. Don’t let it upset you.’
He was soothing her, but all the same there was excitement rippling through the muscles of his arm.
‘You haven’t spoken to anyone about it?’
‘No. No, I haven’t spoken to anyone.’
Not spoken, no. Told the whole world through a short story, if they wanted to read it.
Looking down at the river, she could see that the level had dropped, uncovering lines of bricks on the wall beneath them that looked as if they rarely saw the sun. The timber supports of the pier could be seen increasingly.
‘Low tide.’
Peter nodded and drew her to the rail of the river-walk to look over the side. ‘That’s why I wanted us to get moving. I knew the tide would be on the ebb. And it’s a very low tide now. Things get uncovered that you can’t see easily at other times.’ He knew about the river; in different times might have worked on it, happily and well.
Coffin Underground Page 5
