“You been shooting a line?” asked Crook, amiably, carrying the two tankards over to a small table. “Telling the world Duffy put you on to a winner when ...”
“So he did,” insisted Parks. “Wouldn’t have backed Ladybird else.”
“Well, that’s a funny thing. He was telling the rest of the bar to put their money on Bucephalus. When did he tell you?”
“When he came back from his ’phone call.”
Crook pulled a photograph out of his pocket. “Should you say he had a truthful face?”
Sid stared. “Who’s that?”
“As if you didn’t know. The chap who gave you the tip about Ladybird.”
“Not flaming likely,” said Sid. “That was a tall chap, thin, with a bashed hooter.”
“You don’t say!” said Crook, beaming like a new-born sun. “Funny thing, I had the same idea myself.”
He nipped into a telephone booth and called young Rupert. “Tell your prospective father-in-law he can give his conscience a rest,” he said. “We’ve all been doin’ the police an injustice. They’ve got the right man after all.”
* * *
“I got the idea that afternoon at the Haystack,” he told Harold and Rupert a bit later. Charles hadn’t been invited to the party. “Someone said something about it not being the same man, and as soon as Sid told me his chap had put him on to Ladybird I knew that was the answer. Oh yes, Flavin’s made a clean breast of it to the police—well, he couldn’t help himself, could he, with Sid Parks ready to go into the box and identify him. But he swears—Flavin, I mean—he’d no idea murder was involved and I daresay that’s true. They were a pair of cheap crooks, and I daresay it wouldn’t be the first time they’d stood in for one another. In a crowded pub who’s going to notice a stranger, not on a night like that. Flavin swears he thought Duffy was knocking off a till or so, a bit of shop-breaking, nothing to fret about, so he came along to The Haystack to act as Georgie’s stand-in. Out goes Georgie and presently he puts through the telephone call to establish his own alibi. You know what May Purkiss said—I just put my head round the door and shouted and this chap went along to the ’phone. Only he had to be sure someone remembered George Duffy coming back after the call, so he talked to the first chap he saw, who happened to be Sid Parks, and he talked of the only thing he knew, which was horses. Only, having forgotten more about them than Duffy ever knew, it didn’t occur to him to plug an outsider. Duffy’s mistake was he forgot to tell Flavin he was backing Bucephalus, so Flavin named Ladybird. Funny the little things that destroy men.”
“And Flavin held up Duffy’s alibi while he ...” Harold couldn’t finish. “It was all planned.”
“He was in one hell of a jam,” said Crook, soberly. “Owed money everywhere, and here was she with a nice little balance in the bank—no, I don’t know that he knew about her will, but most chaps are pretty ignorant about law, and he’d assume that as the husband he’d get everything.”
“Can they make it stick?” asked Rupert, anxiously.
“Well, I know Flavin’s a pretty good liar but he’s going to find it difficult to explain how his thumb-print was found on the coin-box at the Haystack when according to him he’d never been inside the place. Ben had the kindness of heart to have it marked Out of Order after my visit, and there wasn’t any trace of Duffy’s dabs there. It’s disheartening really. Sometimes you think chaps ’ull wake up to the fact that crime’s hardly ever worth the candle, and then you’ll find my sort standing in a queue outside the Labour Exchange. You know, they ought to strike a medal or something. Must be about the first time the police and A.C. have seen eye to eye since they dropped the atom bomb.”
Give Me A Ring
It was Christmas Eve and nearly five of the clock, but an afternoon less like the traditional ideas of the season would be hard to imagine. True, a little snow had fallen in the early hours, but this was rapidly churned into slush by the relentless London traffic and about mid-day a haze of fog began to spread over the city. As the afternoon deepened the fog thickened, throwing a yellowish curtain over buildings and the traffic that even now streamed remorselessly through the darkening streets. Not that Londoners allowed that to deter them from providing themselves with everything they wanted or could lay hands on for a merry day to-morrow. It was the best Christmas ever, according to the shops. Peace was just round the corner and prosperity was knocking on the door. Scarcity was receding, and even at this hour the stalls in the market, east of the Mansion House, were doing a roaring trade. Men, their work done until after the holiday, joined their wives, haggling for turkeys and geese at lower figures than they’d have fetched a few hours earlier; children lugged fish-baskets full of oranges and apples and nuts; the last shining boxes of crackers, the dates, the tins of sweets, even the flowers found ready customers. All the Christmas trees had been sold already, but branches of fir and sprays of holly and mistletoe, were being offered from the crowded pavements. The nylon-sellers had moved east from Oxford Street and set up their portmanteaux of wares on the corner; coloured streamers in the hands of children became unfolded and shone out orange and blue and green against the darkening skies.
Gillian Hinde, a student nurse, as pretty as any fairy-tale princess, with her fair, smooth hair tied up in a blue scarf and her eyes shining, stood back to watch the happy, surging crowds. For her, too, the Day had arrived. Most of her friends who wouldn’t be on duty over Christmas had gone home already;
the railway stations—record crowds, declared the radio buoyantly—and the coach stations had been packed all day; north, east, south, the west they had departed. But Gillian envied none of them. No one, she felt, could anticipate a more joyous festival than she. Oh, it was beautiful to be twenty-three and in love, and know that next spring you’d be Mrs. Richard Fyfe. Even now the miracle seemed too good to be true. So many girls in the world, pretty, ardent girls, all eager for love, and out of them all, Richard’s choice had fallen upon her. She could still hardly believe it. Richard, who was bound to be a success, whose hopes soared as high as clouds in summer; Richard, the young doctor of whom everyone prophesied great things, and who wanted to marry her out of all the women in the world.
She had come off duty immediately after lunch and sped back to her little flat—one room really, with a kitchen and a bathroom big enough for a sparrow, Richard teased her, but it was all the home she knew since her father died three years before—sped back to put the final touches to the little shining tree, add the last cards to the red ribbon strings she’d hung on the walls, put up the few sprigs of holly (no mistletoe, no house that needs mistletoe will have any use for it, Richard said), and set the table for the first Christmas dinner she would ever share alone with Richard, who was her dear love and, in a few months, would be her husband. The duck was prepared, the vegetables ready, the fruit set out in the charming rough-cast bowls she had brought back from Spain this summer, the coffee beans were waiting to be ground in the little mill Richard had given her for her last birthday, there were drinks in the ice-box and a dozen silly bits of nonsense tied up in different coloured papers for Richard’s pleasure. She had come east, since the big stores had closed their gates and released their employees at mid-day, to look for the cheeses, the cumqhats, the twists of rye bread they both liked. Someone had told her that in this market there was a stall where you could buy a special kind of sweetmeat Richard adored, and once there she’d lingered, delighting in the scene, the colour, the sounds, the mixture of races and tongues that declared the coming of joy into a thousand homes.
The change took place with practically no warning at all. Between half-past five and six o’clock the whole city changed. The fog that had been no more than a gauze curtain, shot with gold lights from the stalls and the shop-fronts and the street lamps, became a curtain of darkness. People were so much astounded they stopped dead, where they stood, as confounded as if they had stepped all in a moment from one world to another. Mothers turned, calling their children. Stall-holde
rs stood aghast, then began to put together anything that was left. Gillian, who had just turned out of the market, her basket on her arm, her purse in her pocket, intending to make for the high road and catch one of the red buses that would bring her close to her own home, stood as still as the rest, bewildered, though not panicking yet, because this was London, where she had lived for five years and where it was impossible to imagine you could ever be lost.
“If ever you’re not sure of your way in London,” her father had said when she left the country rectory five years ago to start her training at St. Ninian’s, “look for a red bus. Where there’s a bus in London there’s life, and where there’s life there’s hope.” She remembered his kind, infinitely tolerant face, his gentle voice, and calmed her fears.
“I came round a corner when I left the market,” she reminded herself. “If I go along this street and turn right I’m bound to get back to the high road.”
But somehow her calculations must have gone astray, for when she turned the next corner she found herself in another narrow lane, with no lights anywhere. It was useless to try to discover the name of the road; darkness blotted out every landmark, but since all roads lead somewhere, she forged ahead.
She had been walking for some minutes before she had to confess to herself that she was as lost as if she’d walked headlong into the City of Dreadful Night. What was strangest of all was the silence; the voices of children that had pealed all round her a few minutes before were dumb; she could hear no footsteps, no sound of wheels. On either side of her blank walls reared up
into the dark. Surely, if there were houses here, some golden gleams should be perceptible between the hastily-drawn curtains, the sound of a radio set should come to her attentive ears. But though she compelled herself to stand still and listen intently, she heard nothing, not even the whine of a dog or the sound of a passing car. Of course, there was a rational explanation. Clearly,
she had turned away from the residential quarter into one of those roads that were areas of factories, all closed now for the Christmas holiday. Calming her fears, she attempted to retrace her steps. The market couldn’t have shut down in these few minutes; soon she would hear wheels rattling over cobblestones, people calling to each other, all the normal sounds of busy London life. But, though she refused to yield to panic, every step she took seemed to take her further into an uninhabited world.
The sight of a window where a light was still burning, at the end of a ribbon of darkness, gave her heart a sudden lift. Where there were lights there must be people, and where there was even one living soul she would get directions to put her on her homeward road. Walking close against the wall,
for the pavements here were narrow and she had no wish to trip over the kerb, she made her way to that welcome golden pane. Rather surprisingly,
she found the light came from one of those odd establishments known as marine stores, where every kind of junk was on sale, ropes and lanterns and bits of brass, all the flotsam and jetsam of a sea-going community. She stood staring in at the window, wondering what hope an optimistic dealer had of effecting a sale so late and on such a night. And then she saw it—in the very middle of the window, as if someone had set it there for a bait, something so unexpected, and, to her eyes, so beautiful, that she remained transfixed for a moment, while the anxious coffee-coloured little man on the other side of the glass watched her as eagerly and secretively as an animal peering from its hiding-place.
The object in question was a ring, a quite ordinary setting containing a blue stone that glowed and sparkled as if it had gathered up all the light the fog had sucked out of the streets and flung it back with an unbelievable radiance. She had no notion what precisely it was, no stone to which she could put a name, neither sapphire nor opal nor turquoise—one of those mysterious stones whose names made a chain of beauty in that chapter she had heard her father read in the church at home, beryl, jacinth and chrysophrase—a semi-precious stone, of no particular value, probably, brought back by some sailor who had turned it in for whatever it would fetch in money or goods. In her bag were five-pound notes sent by her Aunt Henrietta in the north. Buy yourself a luxury, she had written, but since they had arrived Gillian had seen nothing that would justify the extravagance of so much money for a single present. But once she’d set eyes on the ring she knew there was nothing else in London she wanted so much.
She had a new dress for to-night, a dress of turquoise-blue wool bought for the occasion, just the colour to bring out the blue tints in her eyes that were neither blue nor grey but a mixture of the two. She had scarcely any jewellery. Richard hadn’t given her a ring yet; he wouldn’t give her anything secondrate and she wouldn’t allow him to spend money he couldn’t afford on the sort of ring he would think good enough for her.
“Dear Aunt Henrietta,” murmured Gillian to herself, putting out her hand with a sudden pang of apprehension, in case, after all, the light was a will-o’-the-wisp and the shop was already shut. But she needn’t have feared. The man behind the counter wouldn’t dare put up the shutters, draw down the blind and turn the key until the one he’d been told to expect had put in an appearance.
And when he saw Gillian he supposed that this was the one.
He called himself Mr. Benn now, though that hadn’t been his name in far-away Morocco, where he had been born, and that seemed part of another world, when he thought of it, which wasn’t often. They’d been poor enough then, all of them living in a room not much better than a cave, opening off a narrow alley, with the donkeys going up and down, led by men in native dress, crying as they went, to warn the unwary to get out of the path. He’d been intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, become a player in one of the Moorish cafés, making the music come from a stretched skin, not with a stick as in the West, but with the fingers stiffened or slack to get the appropriate sound. All day long he had sat there cross-legged, while the natives and the foreign soldiers and sometimes the tourists passed through to listen to the music and sip the little glasses of sweetened mint tea. Then, when he was sixteen, everything had changed. There had been a brawl in the café, a man had been killed, and early the next day he had been warned that he was in danger. He hadn’t waited, he supposed he had never been particularly brave, but had gone like a breath of dust, and had never returned. At first he used to wonder about his family, the three sisters at the carpet-weaving school, the brothers who were herdsmen and the one who was a teacher—but he forgot them all at last. The pity was that he had lost the East and had never become truly merged with the West. He worked his way down to the port and eventually he reached Europe, a drifter, a man without a purpose. Now he was a tool, a not very efficient tool at that, in a nasty business, without hopes or prospects, only knowing he’d be lucky if he died in his bed. So many of them didn’t—Eric, who had been taken out of the dock only a week or so before, and the one they called Big Tom, who had contrived to be in the way of a lorry at a place and time where you wouldn’t have expected any lorry to be. He might be the next, or the fourth or the tenth, there was no knowing. He only knew that the boss never forgave mistakes—couldn’t afford to, that was about the truth of it.
He had been waiting a long time for someone to push open the door. Ever since he put the ring in the window he had been anticipating this moment. It didn’t surprise him that he failed to recognise the girl—why should he? He had never seen her before. But he hadn’t somehow expected anyone who looked like this. There were women in the drug-running world, of course, but generally there was something—scarred—about them. This girl looked as young as the morning. He even thought it was just coincidence, that she had lost her way and was coming in to ask how to find it. But as soon as she spoke he knew it was all right, because she said what he had been told she would.
“That ring in your window—the one with the blue stone. How much is it?” He didn’t make any move to show it to her. “What can you offer me for it?”
Make sure you don’t mention a figure,
he had been warned. And she said,
“I’ve only got five pounds. Would that be enough?” She started to open her bag, with a childlike enthusiasm. He turned then and stooped into the window, conscious of a strange disappointment. Not that it was any concern of his, of course. It was just chance—or good judgment on the boss’s part more likely—that she should have that clear, shining look. And why should he care? Innocence was a word he’d forgotten long ago.
The ring looked as beautiful in your hand as it had done in the window, Gillian thought. She slipped it on her finger, turning it this way and that to catch the light from the meagre bulb above the counter. It seemed impossible that anyone should be lost in a fog so long as that existed. It would light you through the darkness of the grave. She came back from her reverie with a blush for her own extravagance.
“Is five pounds right?” she asked, scarcely able to keep the marvel out of her voice.
“That’s right.” His manner seemed strange—weary, as though it made no difference to him whether he made a sale or not; and yet she was convinced it wasn’t because he loved the ring so much himself he didn’t want to part with it.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” she reflected compassionately. “He’s tired.”
And no doubt he had no such glittering prospect to look forward to as awaited her on her return.
“It’s like blue fire, isn’t it?” She smiled. But he didn’t reply. What was there to say? It was a business transaction, like the kiss of Judas in the Christian story that meant nothing to him. Even his own faith didn’t matter anymore. He knew he’d never again hear the muezzin ring out from the balcony of a mosque or hear the guns sound for Ramadan.
He picked up the money she’d laid on the counter and put it in the till.
She was looking about her with frank interest, but he thought it was all assumed, so that she shouldn’t see him take the little packet from under the counter and lay it before her. When she looked back and espied it there she contrived a gesture of quite realistic surprise.
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 9
