Sky High (3 page)

‘In short,’ said Liz, ‘you don’t approve of Special Service Units.’

‘Nothing against them personally. Very good chaps. It’s the idea I don’t like. The hardest job in war is done by the Infantry holding the line. No way out of it. Mud and frost and trench mortars and trench feet—’

‘I don’t think this last war was quite like that.’

‘Bound to have been. All wars are like that if you’re in the Infantry. That’s why I don’t think it’s right to take men out of it, and give ‘em a lot of publicity and train ‘em up for – for bag-snatching expeditions behind the lines. Just a point of view.’

‘Do you mean,’ said Mrs. Artside, ‘that you object to the idea of Special Service because it cheapens the rest of the Infantry, or because it doesn’t achieve its object or because it’s bad for the men in it.’

‘That’s what I like about you, Liz,’ said the General. ‘You’re the only woman I know who thinks like a man. First and second reasons – not the third. I don’t think it turns ‘em into crooks.’

‘Well, thank goodness for that. Have another cup of coffee. I’ll have to make some more for Bob anyway.’

‘You didn’t tell me Cleeve was coming.’

‘I wasn’t sure myself. You know what Bob’s like. He usually comes to collect Rupert on choir nights, if he isn’t too busy.’

‘He’s a worker,’ said the General. ‘Always had the reputation for it. Even in his Army days. I’m only sorry he won’t be performing for us much longer.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing’s up. But he’s sixty-four. As soon as anyone tumbles to it – always supposing they’ve got someone capable of counting up to sixty-four – they’ll be looking round for a bright young nincompoop to take his place.’ The General paused to consider the peculiar ways of county councils, and then added, ‘extraordinary how he’s grown on everybody. You’ll hear ‘em all saying
now
that he’s the best bet the county’s ever had – and so he might be. But that wasn’t the tune when he was elected seven – eight – years ago.’

‘He’s been Chairman for nine years.’

‘Nine, is it? How time goes past.’

‘It wasn’t exactly a popular appointment, was it?’

‘It certainly wasn’t,’ said the General. ‘”No experience”. “Brainless army has-been”. “Jobs for the boys”. So much balderdash. If anyone had taken the trouble to look up his record, they might have saved themselves blowing off a lot of hot air they had to swallow back afterwards.’

‘I don’t see that anyone could call Bob exactly inexperienced,’ agreed Mrs. Artside. ‘After all, he had a top Q job in the Rhine Army at Cologne when he was only—let me see—he can’t have been more than twenty-nine. He was sharing a house with Tom and me when—’

‘Yes, I remember.’

Again something was left unsaid.

After a pause the General added, ‘I’d like to see some of his critics trying to do Q to an Army group.’

‘Then when he retired from the War Office – he was Deputy Chief Constable in Liverpool – and he did that security job for the Home Office in this last war.’

‘I know,’ said the General. ‘I know. But the fact is, poor old Bob looks almost too like a soldier, and that prejudices people.’

‘No doubt about it,’ said Liz, ‘his face is his misfortune. If he was brown, with a hatchet jaw – or white faced, with keen grey eyes – everyone would realise what a tremendous person he was. As it is, he blows out that silly moustache at you, gives you a popping look from his great button eyes, and says “Hrrrmph” – and how can you help thinking, blimp in person! Wasn’t that the bell? I have to answer my own door to-night. Anna’s at the cinema.’

The General sat and listened. He heard the front door open, and Mrs. Artside’s voice, and a man’s voice in reply; and something about Rupert, and ‘Sam can look after him’, and then the drawing-room door opened and Liz came back, followed by the Chairman of the county council.

‘Evening, General. It’s turned cold, hasn’t it.’ Then to Liz. ‘If the car takes Rupert home and comes back, you’ll have to put up with me for an hour. Do you think you can stand it? I’m in need of decent company. I’ve been spending the last two hours with a lot of old women who call themselves a committee. Is that for me? Thank you very much.’

Bob Cleeve accepted the armchair and the coffee cup; lowered himself into the former and lifted the latter to his lips; drank and put it down.

‘Hrrrmph,’ he said genially.

Berowne:

‘And I, forsooth, in love,

I that have been Love’s whip?

A very beadle to a humorous sigh,

A critic, nay, a night watch constable.’

‘In theory,’ said Cleeve, ‘only policemen should be made Chief Constables. After all, they know how the British police system works. They’ve been in it since boyhood. It no longer has power to annoy them. So they’re the obvious choice.’

‘Then why not choose them,’ said Liz.

‘It’s a sore point. Shortage of suitable candidates.’

‘No officer class,’ said the General.

‘It would depend on what you meant by officers. In one sense all policemen are officers—’

‘I always call a policeman “officer” when I don’t know what else to call him,’ agreed Liz. ‘If I see he’s got three stripes, then I promote him to sergeant.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean by an officer,’ said the General crossly.

‘In our case,’ said Cleeve, ‘no question arises. We’ve got a good one, who happens to be a policeman. I had dinner with him this evening.’

‘Tom Pearce is all right,’ agreed the General. ‘Does he run you, or do you run him?’

‘It’s a moot point,’ said Cleeve. ‘As Chairman of the county council, I’m automatically head of the Standing Joint Committee, and in theory the Standing Joint Committee superintends the county police. Actually all we do is appoint a good Chief Constable and let him rip.’

‘And Tom is a good one?’ asked Liz.

‘Yes,’ said Cleeve simply. ‘I think so. He’s unusually co-operative, I should say. And he’s not above asking for advice. When he’s got anything really in his hair he comes round to a meal and talks about it.’

‘And what is it in his hair just now?’

Cleeve looked startled. Liz said, ‘Deduction. You told us he came to dinner with you to-night.’

‘Our chief headache at the moment,’ said Cleeve solemnly, ‘is grocers.’

‘Grocers generally?’

‘Well, grocers who happen to be county councillors. He’s got a big shop in Bramshott. Mind you, I’ve nothing against grocers. I know some very nice ones. But this one’s a particularly—a particularly grocerish sort of grocer.’

‘He keeps a lady in a cage, most cruelly all day, and makes her count and calls her Miss, until she fades away,’ suggested Liz.

‘What? Yes, that sort of thing. Well, this one’s moving heaven and earth to get the police to divert the traffic out of the Market Square, down a side street, and back along South Street. A sort of one-way traffic system. Every time we meet he’s got a fresh reason for it. Overcrowding, parking offences, congestion of pavements. This time he’d managed to tie it up with immorality amongst shop assistants.’

‘He sounds a persistent type,’ said Liz. ‘I suppose he’s got some reason for it.’

‘Of course he’s got a reason. His shop’s in South Street. His chief rival’s in the Market Square.’

‘Why don’t you make it plain that you’ve spotted what he’s up to and tell him to go to the devil?’

‘My dear Liz! That comes of living all your life in nice clean Army circles. I’ve no doubt that Bill, rest his soul, would have upped and kicked him in the pants. But this is the age of democracy. You can’t kick grocers in the pants anymore.’

‘Bill was the most reasonable person who ever lived,’ said Liz.

‘Of course he was. That was what made him an autocrat. Real autocrats are always reasonable.’

‘What nonsense you do talk,’ said Liz dreamily. (It was the real test, she thought. If people who had known and liked Bill talked about him she felt warm and happy. There was no twinge of the old pain. If any other sort of people discussed him, she felt edgy straight away.)

‘—war’s to blame for most things,’ she heard the General saying.

‘Such as which things?’

‘Crime. Violence. Read in the papers the other day, two youths, armed with knuckledusters, attacked an old lady of seventy. Robbed her of her life’s savings. Over two hundred pounds in notes. Kept them under her mattress.’

‘I hold no brief for youths with knuckledusters,’ said Liz, ‘but I can’t help feeling that some of the trouble is caused by the old ladies themselves. Why must they keep their life’s savings under their mattresses? I keep mine in the bank.’

‘I don’t agree that there’s been such an increase in crime since the war,’ said Cleeve. ‘Immediately after, perhaps. Bit of disorganisation then. But we’ve got over that. It isn’t a case of
more
crime. It’s
different
crime.’

‘Advance of science.’

‘No. I didn’t quite mean that. Crooks get more scientific. So do the police. That cancels itself out. I meant fashions in crime. Before the war it was all gangs. Robbery and violence and intimidation. A sort of backwash from across the Atlantic.’

‘I’m glad gangs have gone out,’ said Liz. ‘I never really cared for gangs. What is it now?’

Cleeve paused for a moment before answering, and looked unusually serious. ‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that it’s the age of the solitary criminal. The one-man army. I’m not talking about murder. Murder’s always a solitary job. I mean, real criminals. Blackmailers, burglars, forgers, receivers and larcenists of all sorts from men who blow safes to men who live on handfuls of coppers extracted from telephone boxes—’

‘And you mean,’ said Liz, ‘that all these people work on their own.’

‘Not all. But increasingly more.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought that it was easy to break open a safe single-handed,’ said Liz.

‘That’s because you’re not an expert,’ said Cleeve with a grin. ‘Well, no. Perhaps safe-breaking isn’t a good example. Safe breakers usually work in threes. But take your country house burglar. There’s your crown prince of criminals.’

‘The trouble with you, Bob,’ said the General, ‘Is that you’re really half in sympathy with all these blackguards.’

‘Not really,’ said Cleeve seriously. ‘Most of them are sad nuisances. But just an occasional genius. Do you remember Feder? Or Barry, as he called himself. Outwardly a respectable average adjuster in the city. And no nonsense. It was a real business. If you had an average to adjust, he’d adjust it for you. Only it didn’t quite support his flat in Albany and his house near Leatherhead and his three cars and his strings of racehorses and girlfriends. Those had to be paid for out of his homework.’

‘Homework?’

‘Not very often – so far as one can judge, not more than two or three times in a year – at about eleven o’clock at night he’d leave his country house. No guests that weekend. A conveniently deaf butler and a cook who slept in the far wing. He’d roll his car quietly out of the garage and drive off fast into the night. He’d be back before morning. Old man Reynard, lolloping home to his earth, with a big grin on his face and a tuft of feathers in the corner of his mouth. And sure enough, you’d read in your paper that the country house gang – when in doubt the papers always call it a gang – had broken into the Earl of Mudshire’s residence near Sunningdale and had removed the gold plate from the dining-room, the intaglios from the Long Gallery and the Countess’ own hundred diamond matching necklace (which was of the highest sentimental value to her Ladyship) and the insurers had been informed. Only it wasn’t a gang. It was clever Mr. Feder, who was known to the county as Barry. Who had taken the trouble to teach himself – at an age when most young men are training to cut out an appendix or draw up a will – to pick a lock, dislocate a burglar alarm, silence a dog, and cut a precious stone or a throat in a neat, quiet, gentlemanly way. All his jobs were surgical operations. Long, slow, careful planning, followed by quick, ruthless execution.’

‘I should have thought,’ said Liz, ‘that when he got back to his roost with the loot his troubles were only just starting. How on earth did he turn it into cash?’

‘Well, that’s always a snag. He overcame it by patience. He concentrated on jewellery and precious metals. As I said, he could cut a diamond as well as most experts. And he made his own settings. Lovely work, some of them. But the real thing was that he was able to wait. Years, if necessary. And, of course, when he did come to dispose of anything, his position in life was a help. He wasn’t a hole-and-corner sort of person. He lived a straightforward ordinary life and had lots of rich friends. If he offered a well-known jeweller a pair of pendeloque-cut diamond earrings set in platinum filigree, the jeweller was hardly likely to approach the transaction in a suspicious frame of mind. But suppose, as a matter of precaution, he checked through his latest numbers of “Hue & Cry” and the “Pawnbrokers List.” He wasn’t going to find anything. The diamonds were probably a pair of reshaped marquise-cut stones which had been stolen three years before. And anyway, why should he be suspicious? He knew Mr. Barry well. A very nice gentleman indeed, who had bought a gold cigarette case from him only a month before.’

‘Clever that,’ said the General. ‘I suppose you’d say that his greatest risk was being seen actually on the job.’

‘A risk for him,’ said Cleeve soberly. ‘But, by the Lord, a very much greater risk for the person who happened to see him.’

‘A killer?’ A look of interest flickered into the General’s frosty eye. Killers, he understood. He had encountered a lot of them in his time, two-legged and four-legged.

‘Not by nature, perhaps,’ said Cleeve. ‘But a man like that would kill to preserve his identity. There aren’t many of them about at one time, and the police have got a short list of suspects. I don’t know just how the list is compiled, but you can take it it’s there.’

‘And you mean,’ said Liz, ‘that if some absolutely independent witness – a servant or a guest or the householder himself – happened to meet your man actually on the job, then he’d have to be killed.’