The Garden Party (3 page)

‘Yes, this brick has to be kept clean to do that but Northern Red Brick will glow even if caked with industrial fallout . . . but, yes, glazed brick is quite a luxury and we do appreciate it.'

‘We?'

‘My wife and I,' the man explained.

‘Ah, yes,' Ainsclough replied with a note of apology in his voice. ‘Sorry, I should have realized.'

‘No matter.' The householder smiled. ‘But, glazed brick . . . You know I went to an awful school – a terrible place which was new built and was constructed out of soft, unfaced brick – and I was the first pupil to carve his name into the wall, and another lad who was with me at the time did the same. The staff were not best pleased, the Education Department had, we were told, wanted to build the school in glazed brick to prevent pupils carving their names or their initials into it, but were told by the Council that it would be too expensive, so they had then asked to compromise and have the lower six feet of glazed brick, but even that was out of the question, financially speaking. The school lasted for twenty years without such vandalism, “Then one boy had to come here and now the school is ruined.” They couldn't take action because I wasn't caught in the act and I was not going to admit to anything. Also, I wasn't the only boy in the school with the initials C.B. and the other boy wasn't the only boy with the initials D.H., but they knew I had done it. I was just that sort of boy . . . Fifteen years later I took my wife-to-be to show her my roots and I took her to the school. The initials of other boys had spread out like a virus from where me and D.H. had carved our initials . . . all over the wall and round the corner.'

‘You don't feel guilty about doing that?' Yewdall commented. She was unimpressed and allowed a note of disapproval to enter her voice.

‘Nope.' The man shook his head. ‘No reason why I should feel guilty, it was just that sort of school; it invited contempt. I mean, we were told that Victorians ventilated coal mines by lighting live fires underground to cause an updraught – apparently methane did not exist then – and that the Romans owed nothing to their weapons. What nonsense. We had a maths teacher who did not know what interpolation meant, and that was in the final year. We had a physics teacher whose idea of teaching was to copy the text book on to the blackboard . . . I mean, word for word, and have us copy it into our exercise books . . . and a religious instruction teacher who was so out of his box that he could be goaded into a very satisfying fist fight . . . and you know, quite frankly, in hindsight, I am surprised it took twenty years before a pupil saw the appeal of all that non-glazed brick, and if they had taken action against me I would have returned under cover of darkness and carved my initials below the headmaster's study window. As I said, I was just that sort of boy.'

‘You seem to have done well despite a poor start.' Ainsclough cast an envious eye over the man's house, and having also survived a similar-sounding school he did not share Penny Yewdall's disapproval of the man's early teenage actions and attitude.

‘Yes, I have degrees from three universities. I feel that what I achieved in life I achieved despite my school, not because of it. I am a school governor and read the Old Testament lesson at our church's Evensong Service . . . I am part of our neighbourhood watch team . . . so I dare say that I have evolved out of all recognition from the fifteen-year-old boy with a penknife, but I do not regret doing what I did. But the wall: Mr Brady is repairing it . . . doing a good job. He phoned us this morning to let us know that he wouldn't be attending today; he did not say why and now the police have arrived and have an interest in it. Is it something I should know about?'

‘Yes,' Yewdall replied. ‘I mean, yes, we have an interest in it.'

‘Why?' the man asked.

‘We can't say at the moment, but I can say that it seems unlikely that it is anything that you need worry about, sir.'

‘That's a relief.' The man breathed deeply. ‘When the police call it can only mean trouble in one form or another.'

‘Trouble for somebody,' Yewdall replied, ‘but not necessarily for the person being called upon, as in this instance. We have reason to believe that the wall was also rebuilt some years ago, but not a long time ago.'

‘Yes.' The man looked inquisitively at Yewdall and then at Ainsclough. He saw two plain-clothes officers in their late twenties. ‘Yes, it was; it was a bigger and a more expensive job than we had anticipated. It was leaning you see . . . about ten degrees out of true.'

‘Which is quite a lot,' Yewdall commented, ‘quite significant.'

‘Oh yes, and it was leaning inwards towards our house, not outwards and thus towards the hotel car park. That is inwards from our perspective.'

‘Yes . . . yes . . .' Ainsclough replied, ‘I knew what you meant.'

‘It was like that when we moved in and would probably have stayed like that for the next fifty years, but the children had arrived and since it could not have leaned any more without collapsing, there was no decision to take; it had to be demolished and rebuilt.' The man looked at the pile of bricks. ‘It really was at my wife's insistence; she had a near death experience when she was about five years old; a brick wall collapsed on top of her and her parents were told that the only reason she survived was because she had a very strong will to live . . . but it haunts her.'

‘It would do,' Yewdall said drily, ‘those sorts of experiences never leave any of us. I have a few such memories – we all have – they come unbidden to mind when you can't sleep or are triggered by an unexpected sight or sound or turn of phrase.'

‘Yes, it is like that, and for my wife it's a leaning brick wall with children in close proximity, and so she was nothing if not insistent. So down it came.'

‘Very understandable,' Yewdall nodded.

‘So I negotiated with the hotelier, he's not a bad sort, and I negotiated access to six foot of his land for six weeks because the builders needed access to both sides of the wall in order to take it down and rebuild it. They reckoned the job would take three weeks but I negotiated for six weeks' access. I was just being cautious, you understand.'

‘Sensible.' Ainsclough glanced at the hotel car park and the hotel itself which was clearly once a very large family home. Its white paint was at that moment gleaming in the sun.

‘So we hired a builder. We hired the one who gave the lowest quote and he came and he started work. He was very thorough, painstakingly removing each brick and then chipping away all the old Victorian mortar. These houses were built in the 1890s . . . so very late Victorian . . . and the wall is contemporary with the house; it is mentioned in the deeds. So, once they had all the bricks in a neat pile, they rebuilt it again. This was five years ago.'

‘That is one of the questions we were going to ask.' Yewdall interrupted the householder. ‘You are sure it was five years ago?'

‘Yes.' The householder smiled. ‘Because if you would care to follow me . . .' He turned and led the officers to the far end of the wall near the back of the house where he pointed out the year carved into a wider than usual area in the cement between two bricks. ‘Dare say old habits die hard.' He grinned sheepishly. ‘But there is the date when the cement was still wet. Five years ago this summer.'

‘Good enough,' Ainsclough murmured.

‘Very good enough,' Yewdall also murmured in reply. Then turning to the householder asked, ‘Who were the builders?'

‘Oh, they were an outfit called Seven Kings Construction.'

‘Quite local in that case?' Yewdall commented

‘Not far at all,' the householder agreed, ‘this being Barking, where we are all mad.'

Ainsclough gave a gentle, diplomatic smile at the householder's joke.

‘Just two geezers in the main,' the householder continued, ‘with the occasional extra man. They seemed to have a pool of bricklayers to call on. Once the rebuilding commenced there was just one bloke set to the task, sometimes two, but mainly the one fella. It seemed that the labour was required during the controlled demolition and the chipping away of the old cement. Once that was done and dusted the rebuilding was just a one or two man job.'

‘I see,' Ainsclough replied. ‘Do you have their phone number?'

‘I did,' the householder said flatly. ‘I phoned them up again when that drunken halfwit of a coach driver insisted on driving his vehicle into my wall at fifty miles an hour, but they are no longer trading. Fortunately for me the carpenter who is putting up shelves in my study was able to recommend Mr Brady. He's a good man, a good, steady worker. I don't mind that he has taken a day off; he'll get paid when the job's done but as I say, he's a good, methodical worker. I can tell you that the business premises of the Seven Kings Construction Company have been taken over by an outfit of glaziers . . . same overall line of work, I dare say.'

‘Glaziers?' Ainsclough repeated.

‘Yes, Montgomery Glazing.'

‘Montgomery Glazing,' Ainsclough scribbled the name into his notebook.

‘Yes. I remember the name; it's my sister's married name. So I dare say if anyone can help you trace the builders of the wall of five years ago it will be the people at Montgomery Glazing. It was they who told me that Seven Kings had ceased trading, suggesting they know at least a little of what happened to the proprietors.'

‘Retired.' Alexander Montgomery of Montgomery Glazing Co. smiled in what both Yewdall and Ainsclough thought to be a knowing and a supercilious manner. It was, they thought, the sort of smile that is often displayed by criminals when they say, ‘You'll need more than that if you're going to make this one stick, governor.' Alexander Montgomery was a large man, overweight, as well as being big boned rather than muscular, with thick black hair and a round, reddish face. He was dressed in a brown workman's smock over denim jeans, and wore industrial footwear, which both officers felt must make his feet uncomfortably hot in the present very warm weather. Montgomery received the officers in the small wooden hut which stood on what they both thought to be a large area of land for the premises of what evidently was a small business. It seemed that the premises of Montgomery Glazing were stuck in the corner of a large, uncultivated field. Further off, a second wooden hut, which appeared to be unused, stood in the centre of an adjacent smaller area of land which was also uncultivated; the two plots of land being separated only by an ageing wicker fence, with a gate set in it.

‘It's quiet here,' Yewdall commented.

Montgomery nodded briefly. ‘Yes, it is . . . it's a little oasis of peace in the middle of Ilford but close enough to the town . . . farmland to the north . . . a clay quarry to the south and Painters Lane running between the two . . . east to west . . . straight as a die.'

Outside the hut stood a glazier's lorry with an inclined wooden frame on either side where a large sheet or sheets of glass could be placed and secured prior to transport.

‘You don't seem to be very busy?' Ainsclough observed.

‘Oh, the wagon you mean? It gets used but not often, not a lot of call for full-sized panes of glass for shop windows. We don't get much commercial work.' Montgomery leaned back causing the chair in which he sat to creak loudly under the strain. ‘We mostly get called on to replace smaller panes of glass, house windows and greenhouse windows . . . boys with stones keep us in business. That and house breakers . . . vandals and burglars . . . they keep the nation's glaziers in business, they keep us well happy. Odd stuff glass, it's a liquid you know.'

‘Yes,' Ainsclough replied, ‘I have heard that in fact windows on medieval churches are thicker at the bottom than at the top because over time the glass has succumbed to gravity, it being a liquid, as you say. So, Seven Kings builders?'

‘Yes.' Montgomery shuffled in his chair. ‘They retired . . . we bought them out. That little patch there –' he pointed to the smaller field beyond the wicker fence – ‘that was our property and that little old hut was our office. We had right of access over their land to reach ours. We got on well enough with them . . . two brothers . . . but they got to their mid-sixties . . . sold up . . . we bought the land.'

‘We?'

‘Well . . . I did . . . but me and my little business, we are a “we”.'

‘I see. Quite a lot of land.' Ainsclough glanced out of the office window.

‘Five acres; eight if you include our original little plot.'

‘OK.'

‘Well . . . we have a plan hatching.'

‘Expanding?'

‘Could say that.' Montgomery grinned. ‘Anyway, one of the brothers—'

‘Brothers?'

‘Yes, Roy and Tony Cole. Both retired. One in Spain—'

Ainsclough groaned. ‘Don't tell me . . . Greece . . . Portugal?'

‘Why, don't you fancy an overseas trip?' Montgomery smiled broadly. ‘I have read about the Old Bill travelling the world to interview folk, and also to arrest them.'

‘If we have to, then, yes, we travel,' Yewdall replied coldly, ‘doesn't mean to say we enjoy it; we'd always rather stay closer to home. Travelling is no fun really. You can keep it.'

‘Well, in that case I reckon you have just lucked in,' Montgomery sneered.

‘We have?' Yewdall replied coldly.

‘Reckon so, I reckon so,' Montgomery explained, then paused, ‘but this geezer, Roy Cole, he's not in no trouble is he? I don't want to go grassing anybody up.'

‘No . . .' Ainsclough said calmly, ‘he's not a suspect.'

Yewdall remained silent but she could not help but glance at the small hut in the adjacent field. For some reason she couldn't identify, the small wooden structure seemed suspicious; in fact, she thought it was sinister. Even the jet-black crow which lighted upon the roof as she looked at the shed seemed appropriate.