Sky High (17 page)

There was a row of dustbins against the wall.

Tim got up on to one, felt for the top of the wall, and scrabbled up.

The top was dirty, and slippery with rain. Tim balanced for a moment. Ahead of him was a pit of darkness.

At that moment angry voices broke out from the room he had just left.

He turned on to his stomach, lowered himself to the full length of his arms, and hung for a moment. He hoped there was nothing spiky below. Then he dropped.

His landing place proved soft and yielding. As he got to his feet he decided that it was a bale of partly scraped sheepskins. The smell was powerful and unmistakeable. There was a heap of these bales. He slithered off them and felt his way forward.

He had time to notice that it was still raining.

It was an open yard, at the back of some sort of factory or workshop. The building was barred and inaccessible, but he could see a wooden gate, and the street lamps beyond.

The gate was high, but there might be room to squeeze over the top. He went back to the wall and fetched, one after the other, a dozen bales of skins, which he piled, two deep, into a sloping ramp behind the gate.

From the top he saw that he could manage it. Apart from the steady drip of the rain all seemed quiet.

He hoisted himself over the door with a squeeze. There was one hitch, followed by a sharp tearing sound, and then he was dropping down into the street.

Before he had time even to get to his feet, two unwinking lights had him captive.

A long car slid up and a voice said, ‘Can we be of any assistance?’

There was no choice. The rear door opened and Tim climbed in. Someone flicked on an interior light and he saw that it was the moon-faced man he had noticed in the restaurant. There was another man with him in the back and another in the front beside the driver. They were none of them in uniform, but Tim had no difficulty in guessing who they were.

‘Been killing someone?’ asked the moon-faced man. His voice was unexpectedly authoritative.

Tim glanced at his hands. What with the soot and the sheepskins they were quite something.

‘It’s Artside, isn’t it?’

Tim looked at him. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘It’s been on the tip of my tongue all the evening.’

‘Has it not! I was afraid, once or twice, that you were going to shout it across the room.’

‘Beasley?’

‘Getting warm.’

‘Bazeley. Jaffa. 1947. Right?’

‘That’s right,’ said Detective Inspector Bazeley. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to shake hands until you’ve had a wash.’

An hour later Tim was feeling a lot better. He had had a bath, and his clothes had been dried and brushed.

‘Now perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it’s all about,’ he said.

‘You take the words out of our mouths,’ said Inspector Bazeley, with a glance at his assistant, Detective Pontifex.

Tim considered.

‘I’ll strike a bargain,’ he said. ‘If I tell you what I was doing there, will you tell me what you were up to?’

Bazeley considered.

‘You can check up my references, if you like,’ said Tim. ‘I’m quite respectable. Tom Pearce, our Chief Constable, will give me a chit—’

‘I’ll take you at your face value,’ said Bazeley. ‘You used to be quite reliable in Palestine. You shoot first.’

‘From my end,’ said Tim, ‘there isn’t a great deal to tell. I got a tip through a man – a Major MacMorris—’

It was evident that the name meant nothing to them.

‘It led to the idea that if I sought out a character at Brasseys, called the Captain, and started to talk to him about whisky, then things would happen. I did. They did.’

‘They certainly did.’

‘All right,’ said Tim. ‘Now your turn.’

Inspector Bazeley said, ‘This really is absolutely not for publication. I’d get the sack if anyone knew – however. It’s fencing. Big time fencing.’

‘I see. Any particular line?’

‘There’s no tie-up with any one crowd. They’ll take anything provided they can handle it. And provided the profit margin’s big enough.’

‘I’ve never known a receiver who didn’t feel cheated unless he made eight hundred per cent on every deal,’ agreed Tim.

‘It’s diamonds mostly. Country house stuff. If you’d said “Old Scotch” that would have been diamonds in an old-fashioned setting. Vat 17 – that you wanted £1,700 for them.’

‘I see,’ said Tim. ‘I see. I never got further than the opening gambit. I wonder what they thought I was up to?’

‘I know what I
hope
they thought,’ said Bazeley. ‘I hope they thought you were some amateur who didn’t quite know the ropes. If they
did
think that, then they may carry on. We don’t want them to close down. Such a useful little honey-pot.’

‘And I suppose you’ve had them under observation for some time.’

‘Just over a year,’ said Bazeley calmly.

‘And you’ve got a list of everyone who went in and out?’

‘Not everyone. It’s a pretty busy place. Anyone who turned up at all regularly, or seemed to be too pally with the Captain.’

‘I suppose I couldn’t look—’

‘Well,’ said Bazeley. ‘No. I’d need higher authority before I did that.’

‘All right,’ said Tim. ‘Let me put it this way. If I gave you a name, would you be prepared to tell me if that name was or wasn’t on your list.’

‘I expect I could do that. I’d have to find out.’

‘Splendid.’

Quite suddenly he felt desperately tired. He looked at his watch. It was just past midnight.

‘We can give you a shakedown, here,’ said Bazeley.

‘I’ll tell them to get your bed ready,’ said Detective Pontifex. ‘We’ll put you in the D. T. Cell. I’m told it’s very comfortable.’

‘I’d better do some telephoning first,’ said Tim.

If his mother had gone to bed, which he doubted, the telephone would have been switched through to her bedroom.

He got the number and heard the bell ringing. It went on for a long time.

Worried, he tried the General’s house. The result was the same.

This was inconceivable. On occasions of emergency, when he had had to get hold of him, the General, who was the lightest of sleepers, had answered in a matter of seconds.

He tried both numbers again, feeling the sweat prickling cold on his body with a premonition of disaster.

In the end he gave it up, and after a little thought and research he asked for Bob Cleeve’s number.

The receiver came off the hook so quickly at the other end that someone must have been waiting with a hand outstretched.

‘Tim,’ said his mother’s voice. ‘Am I glad to hear you! No, it’s all right. We’re all of us all right. Yes,
all
of us. We’re out at Bob’s place. There’s nothing you can do. No, nothing. But come down as quickly as you can in the morning. Something not very nice.’

Armado:
‘We will put it, as they say, to
“fortuna de la guerra”.’

On the morning of that Friday, as the General and Sue were finishing breakfast, Bob Cleeve’s large, maroon-coloured Bentley poked its nose into their front drive.

Sue opened the front door, ducked a fatherly kiss from Bob, and showed him into the breakfast room, where the General was unfolding the
Times
which it was his habit to read, pretty carefully, from cover to cover each day.

‘I’ve got a Chairman’s conference at Westminster,’ Bob explained. ‘Juvenile delinquency again. Thank you very much, Sue. I wouldn’t say no to a cup of your coffee. You’re looking particularly ravishing this morning. Must be because you’ve got such a clear conscience. The Press are going to be admitted and I don’t mind betting that it’ll be a regular jamboree. There’s something about juvenile delinquency that stirs the heart and soul of our newspaper-reading public.’

‘Well, it’s uncommonly kind of you,’ said the General. ‘If you really are going up I’d be pleased to come with you. I take it you’ll be going through Staines.’

‘Can’t avoid it.’

‘Splendid. And how very kind of you to look in on the off chance.’

‘I didn’t come to see you,’ said Bob. ‘I came to look at Sue. And, by Jove, she’s getting more worth looking at every day.’

Sue snorted and went on with her breakfast.

As the big car scudded along the pleasant stretch between Bramshott and Wentworth the General, feeling that silence would have been a sort of discourtesy, explained to Cleeve, in outline, what he was doing.

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Cleeve. ‘But I think you’ll be lucky if you find anything. You know what Courts of Inquiry were like. By the time the talking was over you felt so fed up that you shoved down the shortest account you could, consistent with not getting a rocket from the convening authority. “Court of Inquiry assembled this blank day of blank to inquire into the loss of Gunner Bloggins’ boots. Gunner Bloggins in evidence said, I am Gunner 99999 Bloggins—”.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the General. ‘I’ve done plenty of them. All the same, this wasn’t Gunner Bloggins’ boots. Someone had blown up the Commanding General. That may have made them a little more long-winded.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Bob.

The car swooped down Egham hill, by-passed Egham on the left, and entered the mile of gasometers and cafes that leads to Staines bridge.

‘We shall have to pack our conference up at four o’clock,’ said Bob, ‘whether we’ve finished or not, but I can’t guarantee to be here before five. Will that do?’

‘It’s extremely kind of you,’ said the General. ‘I think the place is somewhere behind here, on the right. Put me down at the bridge and I’ll find it.’

It had once been, and still looked like, a motor-car factory. The wire-mesh entrance gates were shut and the commissionaire’s hutch stood empty.

The General found a bell and rang it.

After a pause a door in the building opened and a man came out and crossed the yard. He was in neat battle dress, with shoes instead of boots and gaiters, and he wore the crown of a warrant officer on his forearm.

From the name and the rank the General had inferred someone with a red face, a lot of body and a hearty manner. Sergeant-Major Bottler was, therefore, a surprise. He was small and grey-haired and he wore steel-rimmed glasses. Only a certain self-sufficient neatness in his carriage and movement suggested the old soldier.

He said, ‘General Palling?’ and saluted.

The General raised his bowler hat punctiliously, and the Sergeant-Major unlocked the gate.

‘I gathered from the War Office something of what you wanted, sir. It’s going to be a bit of a job to find it. Mind your head.’

They ducked under the open porte-cochère, cut in a large steel door which had evidently not been fully opened since the day when the last car had rolled off the production line. They were in a roomy building, something between a barn and a hangar. A little light filtered through overhead windows. It was quite warm.

‘We have to keep the heating going,’ explained the Sergeant-Major. ‘Otherwise the damp would get at the papers. It comes up off the river. Damp and rats. They’re the two things we have to worry about most. You wouldn’t think rats could live on paper. But I believe they do – the little beggars. Only last week I found a nest of them, right in the middle of a bunch of A.B.104’s. Hold hard, sir. We’ll have some light on the scene.’

He clicked down two switches and a battery of big, overhead lamps opened up.

The whole floor space, as the General now saw, was honeycombed with wooden shelves. Not proper book-shelves, but slats resting on upright boards. On the lower shelves were different sizes of black tin boxes with drop-fronts. On the upper the papers stood piled in folders. The shelves ran up to a height of about eight feet. Above them, grey over the swinging electric globes, loomed the vast obscurity of the factory roof.

‘There’s bats up there,’ said the Sergeant-Major. ‘If you shine a torch up you can see them. Would you care to step into my office, and I’ll just show you how we’re arranged.’

The Sergeant-Major’s office was a cheerful little room; a kettle humming on the stove, a cat sleeping in the corner; a snug cabin in a grey wilderness. The Sergeant-Major unrolled a plan which showed the layout and opened filing cabinet after filing cabinet as he demonstrated the arrangement of his huge charge. It was difficult to imagine anyone having an affection for a thousand tonnes of paper, but when a man is in love with his job it shines in his eyes and speaks through his speech.

The General found himself warming to the Sergeant-Major.

‘It’ll be in the north east block, that’s certain, sir. All the disciplinary proceedings are there, except sex. We keep sex in separate boxes against the north wall.’

‘How satisfactory,’ said the General. ‘I mean – I don’t think sex comes into this one.’

‘The next point is, when were the papers lodged? We can’t file them according to the year they relate to, you see, because that would mean opening every blessed paper and reading it, and that I can’t do. So we file them in years of lodgement.’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said the General. ‘Not exactly. It can’t be before 1920 – probably later. But not likely to be much after 1924. They broke up those war-time formations pretty quickly.’

‘Then we’re cross indexed under countries. India, Egypt, Far East, and so on. This would be Germany, I take it.’ The Sergeant-Major rattled his thumbnail through a dozen cards. ‘Occupation Forces, we called it then. It’s all B.A.O.R. now. Anyway, that’ll be enough to get us into the right section.’

‘I think it’s extremely helpful,’ said the General. ‘I’d no idea it was all arranged in such a businesslike way.’

‘We try to be businesslike,’ said the Sergeant-Major, much gratified. ‘Would you come this way? That’s right. We’d better bring dusters. I get round the whole lot once a month, but it soon settles again.’

‘Now see here,’ said the General. ‘Don’t you bother to do the actual searching. I’m sure you’ve plenty to do. And I’ve got all the time in the world. I’ll soon get the hang of it.’