Sky High (18 page)

All in all, the General could not remember when he had passed such a satisfactory morning.

Almost at first dip he picked out the papers of that extraordinary business in which Tricky Pellow had almost lost his commission. Indeed,
would
have lost his commission had not justice been tempered with a good deal of imagination; a piece of long-sighted clemency which paid off when Pellow did so well in the South African War.

Thinking of Pellow, somehow put him in mind of Masters, and a disastrous piece of horse-coping, a matter in which he had been called on himself to give evidence. It gave him quite a shock to find his own name. ‘Colonel Palling stated that, in his opinion, the fact that the horse had thrown General Pargeter during a ceremonial parade did not, in itself, prove that the horse was vicious—’

How important it had all seemed at the time. How little it all mattered now. General Pargeter must have been dead half a century. Masters? Masters had died on the Somme, like a lot of other good fellows.

At this point the General was diverted from a train of melancholy by the happy discovery of the papers relating to the Covent Garden Ball rumpus.

When he had finished with these he looked guiltily at his watch and found that it was nearly two o’clock. So he went out to see if he could find some lunch, which he did, eventually, at a café which had been designed to deal with the summer boating trade but was now some weeks past its normal time for hibernation and inclined to be resentful about it.

During the afternoon he addressed himself more seriously and methodically to his task and by four o’clock he was getting warm. At one moment he thought he had it. He had untied a bursting buff folder labelled (promisingly enough) ‘Occupation Forces, Cologne. Headquarters Records’. They were in no sort of order, but that he was on the right track was proved by the fact that Lieutenant-General Artside’s name appeared with increasing frequency.

He was hampered by the fact that he could not remember the exact date on which the explosion had occurred. He seemed to remember that it was some time in October of 1920. He searched again through the file and discovered an odd thing. There were papers connected with every other month of the year, but nothing at all for October.

He went through it once again, to make certain. Then he looked at the backs of the other folders in that box. None of them seemed even remotely promising.

The General put the Cologne folder away, in the front of the box, and went to find Bottler.

‘I suppose you get a lot of visitors,’ he said.

‘One or two a day, most days,’ agreed the Sergeant- Major. ‘Mostly from War Office and Records. They come down to borrow papers.’

‘Borrow?’ said the General sharply. ‘But you’d keep a record of any papers they took away.’

‘Certainly sir. Any particular file you had in mind?’

‘It’s box M.B. – I’ve jotted the number down somewhere—here it is – 56.’

‘M.B.56.’ The Sergeant-Major consulted his filing system. ‘No there’s nothing out from that—except that—wait a moment. Well, now, that’s an odd coincidence. It really is.’

The General waited patiently.

‘There’s nothing booked out from that file but I do remember it was looked at. Normally, I wouldn’t remember a thing like that, but—M.B.56—you see, sir. That’s my wife’s initials, Madge Bottler, and it was her exact age. The day it was looked at was her birthday.’

The General thought hard.

‘How old is Mrs. Bottler now?’

‘Fifty-seven last April. April 10th.’

‘I see. Then it was on April 10th of the year before that someone went to that file. I expect you keep a visitors’ book.’

‘Certainly.’ The Sergeant-Major opened a ledger. The General noticed that his own name and rank had already been neatly entered.

Against April 10th of the previous year there was only one name. Major Robinson.

‘I’m afraid I don’t really remember anything about him,’ said the Sergeant-Major apologetically. ‘It was just the coincidence, you see, of the file and the number, and on that particular day.’

‘Hmp. The rank’s not very helpful either. There were a lot of very old Majors left over from the first war, and a lot of very young ones out of the second. Never mind. As you say, it was an outside chance that you remembered it at all.’

A rich-sounding motor horn spoke from the street.

‘I’ll have to knock off now,’ said the General. ‘That sounds like my lift home.’

The Sergeant-Major followed him out. It was Cleeve all right. He was hunched up over the wheel and what little could be seen of him looked depressed. The juveniles must have been more than normally troublesome.

The Sergeant-Major walked round and held the door open for the General. He shut it after him, and saluted. The General turned down the window, put his arm and shoulder out, and shook hands warmly.

‘You’ve been most helpful and considerate,’ he said, ‘and it’s been a real pleasure meeting you.’

The Sergeant-Major looked startled but pleased. He stood for some time staring after the long car as it gathered speed up the road.

‘I don’t know about you,’ said Cleeve at last, ‘but I haven’t yet found time for any tea. There’s rather a nice little place in Egham – that’s it – with the bottle glass windows. They make good toast, and plenty of it.’

He still seemed worried. Evidently there was more than juvenile delinquency on his mind. When he said, as soon as they were alone with their tea, ‘I saw Tom Pearce last night. He’s not at all happy about things,’ the General had no need to ask him what business he was talking about.

‘He’s not the only one,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember seeing Liz in quite such a state before.’

‘Liz is a damned level-headed woman,’ agreed Cleeve. ‘But in this particular instance I think she and the police are worrying about different things. She’s worried that they aren’t taking her discoveries seriously. That’s where she’s wrong. They are. It’s what happens next that worries them.’

‘Yes,’ said the General. He was cutting the crusts carefully off a round of toast.

‘MacMorris was blackmailing someone. We might as well say it. We’ve all been thinking it. So someone decided to get rid of him. Very understandable reaction. It’s just the way he carried it out makes it so frightening. It’s not the sort of way I’d choose myself – too complicated and chancy. But you can’t deny that it was damnably effective. It not only destroyed MacMorris, it destroyed all the clues, too. You saw the house—’

‘Yes,’ said the General. ‘All the same, there was the suggestion of an unbalanced mind in it.’

Cleeve looked up sharply.

‘A madman,’ he said.

‘Yes. Or a madwoman. You haven’t really got much line on the sex of the murderer, have you? Single blonde hairs on the sofa, and so on. If there were any, they went sky high with the fingerprints and everything else.’ He added, ‘Don’t mean a raving lunatic. Someone with an element of unbalance in their make-up. The idea of wiping out a single threat with a great big explosion. There’s something elemental about that.’

The two men sat on in silence for a few minutes. The toast was, really, very good. It was buttery and soft enough not to worry the General’s teeth.

In the end he broke the silence himself.

‘It’s a point of difference,’ he said, ‘between dangerous animals and dangerous people. Animals just go on quietly being killers. They don’t let circumstances worry them. Humans are different. However sound their nerve may be, if they feel themselves pressed, they do stupid things. That makes them more dangerous in a way. But it makes them easier to catch.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cleeve soberly. ‘It’s getting dark already. We’re in for some rain.’

In fact, rain was falling as they went out to the car.

Earlier that afternoon Liz walked up to the far end of Brimberley to call on Jim Hedges.

The garage and motor repair shop lay beyond the bridge over Brimber brook which circled the churchyard at that point.

Liz had never before penetrated beyond the penthouse in front where she paid for the oil and petrol and bought an occasional spare part for her motor-cycle. She had not realised the full depth of the interior building.

A car, stripped to its chassis, and tilted at an uncomfortable angle on props and jacks, waited patiently for the hand of the surgeon. Jim was beyond the car, busy at a bench. He was using a bright pair of long-nosed pliers to tiddle a copper wire along a steel channel. His huge, oil-blacked hands worked with curious delicacy and precision.

It has taken three generations to do it, thought Liz, but we’ve bred him at last, the natural mechanical countryman. Spanners now, not scythes; horse-power instead of horses. But just as patient and just as instinctively clever with the new toys as he had been with the old.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Jim,’ she said.

The noise of the charging-plant must have killed the noise of her approach, but when she spoke the big hand did not jump a fraction of an inch.

‘Well now, Mrs. Artside,’ said Jim. ‘Motor-cycle trouble or choir trouble?’

‘Choir trouble,’ said Liz. ‘Treble trouble.’

‘That makes it five to one it’s something to do with my lot.’

‘That’s it. It’s one of yours. Has anyone said anything to you?’

Jim put down the pliers and wiped his hand on a piece of rag. He looked worried.

‘I heard something,’ he said. ‘You know how it is in a village.’

‘I know how it is in a village,’ agreed Liz. ‘And that’s why I came round. What’s the strength of it, Jim?’

‘I haven’t spoke to Morry yet,’ said Jim. ‘He’s at school, see. I was going to talk to him this evening. What do you think, Mrs. Artside?’

‘I don’t think he took it.’

‘It didn’t sound like our Morry,’ agreed Jim. ‘Nor I couldn’t quite see how he was supposed to have done it. He’s not what you’d call a pick-lock. Not like his old man.’

‘Can you pick locks, Jim?’

‘Most of ‘em,’ said Jim, suddenly grinning. ‘But it’s not a thing I’ve taught the kids yet. You never know with a parlour trick like that. What I did wonder’—Jim looked serious again—’if it’s right he had a ten shilling note, he can’t have come by it honest. Sixpence a week and their lunch money. That’s all they get, unless it’s a birthday or Christmas. But I did wonder if he might have got hold of it here. Those kids are all in and out, and I don’t lock the money up, which I ought to, I know—’

‘It sounds a much more likely explanation,’ said Liz. ‘I always found Maurice truthful myself. When I asked him straight out, had he taken it, he said, “I never took any money from the box in the church.” Straight out. Just like that. It did occur to me to wonder, afterwards, if he wasn’t being a little
too
truthful – if you see. Just telling the literal truth and hiding behind that.’

‘I’ll talk to him this evening when he gets home,’ said Jim. ‘I’d rather it turned out to be my money he took. Keeps it in the family. Not that it’ll save him from a walloping he’ll remember, if so he did do it.’

When Liz got outside she stood for a moment wondering what she wanted to do next.

The afternoon had been growing steadily darker. There was rain, and plenty of it, piled up in the dirty, over-blown clouds to windward.

On Fridays she usually spent the evening with the General. And if Tim had anything to keep him in London he would arrange it for that evening. Today, however, the General had gone up to Staines, to look at some papers. To rustle about, amongst matters long dead.

Long dying, but now dead.

The rising wind was whipping the trees, stripping off their last leaves, baring their branches for the stark severity of winter.

‘Stop brooding,’ said Liz to herself. ‘Life isn’t really like that at all. It’s the weather, and the uncertainty. You want a cup of tea, and a good gossip.’

She set out briskly, back over the bridge, across the churchyard, down the small strip of High Street, keeping along it until she was past the speed limit signs, and saw the poplars that marked the turning into Melliker Lane.

Sue was at home. Liz heard her start downstairs as soon as she rang. Then, rather to her surprise, the click of the key being turned back. The Pallings’ front door usually stood on the latch.

‘Am I glad to see you,’ said Sue. ‘I’ve been sitting here having the willies.’

‘Me too,’ said Liz. ‘It’s something to do with the weather. Can I help you get tea? I pine for tea. Tea and toast.’

‘For goodness sake, yes,’ said Sue.

They went along to the kitchen. Liz put the kettle on and Sue cut some bread.

‘If I’d known what it was going to be like this afternoon,’ she said, ‘I’d never have allowed grandfather to go. It started getting dim soon after lunch. If I’d had any sense I’d have cleared right out, and taken a bus over to Bramshott and gone to the cinema or something. But instead I sat in my room and tried to catch up with jobs. I thought I would sustain myself with virtue.’

‘Fatal,’ said Liz. ‘When you feel the blues coming on you’ve got to go out and do something violent and silly.’

‘It wasn’t too bad until I heard the ticking.’

‘You heard what?’

‘Ticking. When I sat quite still I could hear it distinctly.’

‘But—’

‘It’s all right. I ran it to earth. It was the gas meter under the stairs. After that I started hearing little men. Sometimes they were upstairs, sometimes down.’

‘They get about,’ agreed Liz. ‘Was that when you locked the front door?’

‘That’s right. Let’s take it upstairs. I’ve got a good fire.’

They went to Sue’s room. She had, for her own, the big front room, on the first floor, with the bow windows. It was a nice room, with just that shade of uncertainty in the decorative arrangements that reminded Liz of her own youth.

Over a cup of tea Sue looked levelly at Liz and said, ‘And just what’s wrong with Tim these days?’

Liz tried to consider the matter dispassionately, whilst half of her mind was weighing up the form of the question, to see if she ought to read something into the fact that it had been asked at all.

‘He was always a difficult boy,’ she said. ‘Nice, but difficult. I don’t think it was only because he never had a father. Something to do with it, but not much. Then, the ‘thirties were a bad time for a boy to grow up in: I don’t imagine, when we’re far enough away to look back at them, that we’re going to be awfully proud of the ‘thirties. Then again, he was too good at games. And that made everything a bit too easy for him at school. He didn’t have to work his way to the top. He got there by divine right, because of some knack of co-ordinating wrist and eye, which meant that he could score runs at cricket or points at racquets, or whatever it was the school needed at that moment to make them happy. He must have got all that from his father. I never had any eye for that sort of thing. I was a promising boxer, though, at the age of ten.’