Thief Taker

by Alan Scholefield

  “I admire her, in a way.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “No, not in that way. Well…in that way too, I suppose. No, I mean, it must have been hard with two kids — ”

  “And a large house, and an au pair, and a private school. Jesus Christ, she wouldn’t give up a bloody thing.”

  “Well, Mrs Thatcher started it, guv’nor. It’s called the “enterprise culture”.”

  Eddie began to squeeze the car into what would have been a non-existent parking space for the average motorist. “What sort of deal could we offer?” Silver said.

  “We just let her change the nature of the visit,” Macrae said. “Nothing difficult about that. She was going to see him. Half a dozen reasons. Doesn’t matter why she was there. Saw him lying in a pool of blood. Panicked. Ran. I don’t mind what bloody reason she gives for being there, just so long as she tells us the truth. We’re not finished with her yet.”

  “I won’t be a minute,” Silver said, getting out of the car and entering the block of flats.

  As the little cage lift reached the top floor he could hear the piano in his father’s music room and his resonant voice counting, “Vun-and-two-and-three-and-four-and — Quavers, Futterman, quavers!”

  As Leo entered his mother said, “What’s this? A visit from my big son on a working day!”

  She too had trouble with the English voiced “w” and it came out “vurking day”.

  “I was nearby,” Leo said. “I came to say goodbye again and tell you I’m not going to be away for a week. Only for a couple of days.”

  “But darling, you need a holiday,” Lottie said. “Sit. Sit.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Have you had your lunch?”

  “I’ll get something at the station.”

  “What can they give you at the station? Plastic rubbish. Have a sandwich. A piece of cake.”

  “Mr Macrae’s waiting for me in the car.”

  Her face fell but her natural hospitality overcame her antipathy to the man. “Fetch him, darling. I make some coffee.”

  “I don’t think he’ll — ”

  “Has he had his lunch?”

  “No.”

  “This is your mother speaking. Go fetch him.”

  Leo went down to the car and said, “My mother insists you come up for a coffee, guv’nor. What about you, Eddie?” But Eddie shook his head. “I had mine. I’ll take a nap.”

  “I could do with a coffee.” Macrae followed Leo into the building.

  Lottie had met Macrae several times and she and Manfred had early formed an unfavourable opinion of him. Manfred believed that men who lived without wives were probably not as clean as they might be.

  Once, at a small Christmas party given by the Silvers, Macrae had arrived well-oiled and had used the bathroom.

  A moment later Manfred went in, checked, and then looked for and found Leo. “He hasn’t washed his hands,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Your Mr Macrae.”

  “Dad, for God’s sake!”

  “I checked the towels.”

  “You want me to ask him?”

  “I just want him to wash his hands when he goes to the toilet.”

  “I’ll tell him, Dad. I’ll tell him he’s got to wash them in antiseptic.”

  “Don’t be smart with your father. You know what I mean.”

  On the other hand Lottie saw him as a kind of albatross around Leo’s neck; someone who was in a constant state of war with the police hierarchy and who would therefore do her son no good.

  But no one would have known that, for her greeting was warm and gracious — the doctor’s daughter from Vienna.

  “A little Bismarck herring,” she said. “A little salad.”

  Macrae said, “Please don’t go to any trouble, Mrs Silver.”

  “What trouble?”

  As she spoke she laid things out on the coffee table in the drawing room.

  There was the noise of raised voices in the music room, then a door slammed and a spotty-faced youth with large ears, thick glasses and a flushed face passed the drawingroom door on his way out.

  They heard Manfred’s voice carry down the corridor, “Vun-and-two-and-three-and-four-and! You hear me? Count!” The front door slammed.

  Manfred came into the drawing room. “My God!”

  “You remember Mr Macrae,” Leo said hastily.

  “Certainly I remember Mr Macrae.”

  Manfred looked dapper in a bottle-green corduroy jacket, his grey hair and Van Dyke beard were glossy and well combed. He kept his hand firmly in his pocket in case Macrae tried to shake it.

  “Just a little lunch for Mr Macrae and Leo,” Lottie said.

  He sat down and watched his son and his son’s superior officer tuck into the Bismarck herring and salad.

  After a moment he said, “Futterman!”

  “What, Dad?”

  Two days ago Arnold Futterman called me up. You remember Futterman?”

  “Wasn’t he a plumber?”

  “Now plumbing supplies. Has a shop in Finchley. Gold taps. Teak toilet seats. Sells to Uppies. They tell me he’s going to be a rich man.

  “So anyway Futterman calls me and says his son Harold is taking his exams and he would like that I give him a polish. A little Debussy, a little Bach, a little Schubert. I said, “Arnold, I got pupils booked from now till Christmas. I got more pupils than I can handle.”“

  He absently reached for a dill pickle and began to chew it.

  “You know what he says to me? He says, who came out one night in the snow to mend a burst pipe? Who came out to unblock the lavatory that time Leo stuffed — ”

  “Manfy!” Lottie said. “People are eating! Not about lavatories!”

  “So anyway Futterman says I owe him. So what can I say? You owe someone, you owe him.” He pointed to the music room. “That was Harold Futterman you just heard. Thirteen years old. Spots. I ask him to play some Bach. So he plays for me the F sharp minor prelude from the second book. I said you’re playing it too fast. It’s marked andante. He says Glenn Gould plays it fast. I said: “Harold, Glenn Gould is dead from playing so fast.””

  He turned abruptly to Macrae. “Do you play the piano?”

  “I used to play the drum,” Macrae said.

  “Ah. A tympanist. I too. Rataplan! Rataplan! In an orchestra here in north London. Maybe you heard of it.”

  “I don’t think Mr Macrae would’ve — ”

  “Why not? People came from all over. We played at the old Hippodrome in Golders Green. I remember once in Haydn’s “Drumroll” symphony — ”

  “In a band,” Macrae said, fearing he was getting deep into unchartered territory.

  “Ah. A band. Gene Krupa. Big Sid Catlett. I remember the old V-discs. From the war. American All Stars.”

  “A cadet band,” Macrae said. The school cadet band.”

  Manfred stared at him. Silence fell. Leo hastily tried to fill it.

  “What are you up to, Dad? How’s the symphony coming along?”

  “He’s got a new idea, your father. Now an opera.”

  “The biggest opera ever staged,” Manfred said. “Bigger than Aida. Bigger than The Trojans.”

  “What’s it about?” Leo said.

  “Better you don’t ask,” Lottie said.

  “Luther. The Reformation. The Diet of Worms.” He turned to Macrae. “With music worked from Bach’s church cantatas. Ich habe genug…Wachet Auf…Full of irony, don’t you think?”

  Macrae stuffed a piece of herring into his mouth so he would not have to reply.

  “Sounds fantastic,” Leo said.

  “Fantastic is right,” Lottie said. She turned to Macrae. “Tell me, Mr Macrae, how is Leo doing?”

  “For God’s sake, mother!”

  “I mustn’t ask about my only son? We’re interested. Have I made a mistake?” She turned fierce eyes on Macrae.

  “No, no, Mrs Silver. Of course not. He’s doing well.”

&n
bsp; “There…” Mrs Silver said to Leo. “Did that hurt? Now we know.”

  The sweat had burst out on Leo’s face and trickled down to his chest.

  As they got into the car he said, “I’m sorry about that, guv’nor.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  “Putting you through it. My family is — ”

  “Laddie, you don’t know when you’re well off.” Macrae’s expression was bleak.

  “Where to now, guv’nor?” Eddie said.

  “Let’s go and bully Mrs Robson Healey,” Macrae said. “It’s about time we did.”

  *

  Rawley…Rowley…Jackanory…How does your garden grow?

  You can’t stay here all the time, the princess had said. Not in the caravan. It wouldn’t be right.

  He went under. Like a dog.

  Rawley…a dog’s name…

  If I had three wishes…I wish…I wish…

  But there was nothing he could think of to wish for.

  It was gloomy afternoon now in the Forest of Dean with the trees like witches and light rain on the wind. Rachel had thought to send him away but emptiness and loneliness changed her mind. He would leave a vacuum where only she remained. He gave the same companionship as a dog. He wanted stories like dogs want stroking. No, not a dog, a child. A sixty-year-old child who wants to hold back the dark. Just one more story, Mummy…

  She had done it herself, wanted to postpone going to bed for ever in case he came in, bringing the red rabbit with him.

  So she told Rawley he could go in the dry under the caravan. Preserve the proprieties. “I’m not sending you away,” she had said when she saw his face. “You can come in again when I’m not resting. You can’t be here when I’m in bed. My husband wouldn’t like it.”

  “No. No. Not in here. I know that.”

  So he lay in a blanket with his plastic bags alongside him, listening to her movements above. She wasn’t resting. She was pulling things and pushing things. And sometimes he heard her voice. Not what she was saying, but the series of strange glottal sounds that made him think of rage.

  He was a gangrel.

  He was afraid.

  Oh, yus.

  CHAPTER XXI

  It was early evening in central London, the ancient brickwork glowing in the late sunshine.

  Zoe and Leo were sitting at their usual table in the Old Vienna off The Strand, one of the few wine bars she would patronise. It was her contention that most food offered in wine bars, pubs and restaurants came out of a single gigantic kitchen in Swindon: all those veal chasseurs and marengos, that deep-fried Camembert, the chilli con carnes — all cooked in steaming vats, then frozen, loaded into trucks and aimed at a million microwaves the length and breadth of the land.

  In the Old Vienna the cooking was sound if not brilliant and sometimes tasted slightly burnt — which she defined as a genuine flavour — and the wines were dependable.

  “So what’s all this in aid of?” Zoe said.

  “All what?”

  “Glasses of plonk.”

  She was still slightly high, he thought, from her lunchtime party, though he had established that it was not a going-away bash for her holiday but because a new client had sent in a case of champagne. The holiday was something he was approaching slowly.

  They were sitting in a bay window with the sun streaming in and he thought she was looking stunning in black and red; his favourite combination. He loved looking at her face with its high cheekbones, the red slash of colour on the lips, her olive skin. She was wearing stockings and a mini skirt and the sun caused her legs to shine.

  “OK,” Zoe said. ““My Day, by Leopold Silver. Boy Detective.””

  He laughed and told her about Collins then Mrs Spilsbury and calling in to see his parents, but not the reason. And then the second visit to Shirley Healey.

  “Oh, right. The wife.”

  “She must have been beautiful once. Cool. Laid back. Except the phrase apparently means something different to her.”

  “Leo, I think you’re meeting the wrong class of person.”

  He had hardly recovered from Mrs Spilsbury’s smile with its promise of hidden vice, when he was under the cool eyes of Shirley Healey whom he knew to be far from cool.

  Ladies’ legs were what undid Silver. Legs in shiny stockings. Mrs Healey wore shiny stockings and had long legs which she crossed. Last time she had worn a black dress in deference to her abruptly deceased husband, but when they had interviewed her an hour earlier she was wearing a white polo-neck sweater which showed off her colouring to perfect advantage.

  She’d let them in as though she had been expecting them and her expression was wary. They’d perched on the same button-backed chairs they’d sat in the first time and she had sat in a low chair facing them.

  “We’ve spoken to Mr Harris,” Macrae began. The tone of his voice was brisk, no nonsense.

  “I thought you might.”

  “And Mr Collins.”

  Her eyes widened. “I thought he was in Spain.”

  “No, he’s in London. Has Mr Harris been in touch with you?”

  “He phoned to say you’d been to the cottage. He’s the caretaker.”

  Macrae frowned at her. “That’s it? The caretaker?”

  “How else would you describe someone who looks after your property in your absence?”

  “It’s not what he does in your absence that we’re talking about. But in your presence.”

  “What has he been suggesting?”

  Very cool, Silver thought.

  “That you and he were, are, lovers.”

  She made a slight grating noise that might have been a laugh. “That’s absurd.”

  Silver said, “He says that last weekend you and he had a party that occupied Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Mr Harris has a vivid imagination. The only relationship I have with Mr Harris is one of employer and employee.”

  “What about the champagne? There were empty bottles in his boat as well as in your cottage.”

  “How would I know?”

  “The champagne was vintage and expensive,” Macrae said. “It isn’t the kind of thing he would normally drink.”

  “I’m not responsible for what people drink.”

  “The same brand was found in your cottage.”

  “Inspector, I find this impertinent.”

  “Superintendent!”

  She waved a hand. “Whatever.”

  “Mrs Healey, let’s not mince words.” Macrae’s voice dropped two semi-tones and became darker. At this point Silver began to feel sorry for her. “You say Harris is a caretaker; he says you are lovers; that you and he have drinking bouts; that you go to bed together.”

  “You have a gift for phraseology.”

  “I inherit it from a Presbyterian grandfather.”

  It was no use being ironic with Macrae, Silver thought. “And you believe him?” she said. “Why on earth do you think I would be interested in a person who looks after boats?”

  Macrae said softly, “You were interested in Robson Healey. It might be said that a man who owns and charters a yacht “looks after boats”.”

  She lit a cigarette and Silver caught a slight tremor in her hand as she did so. He suddenly imagined the nerve storm that must be convulsing her brain.

  “You had an affair with Howard Collins. And he looked after boats. I’m using the phrase loosely. It does seem that you have an interest in men who deal with boats.”

  “That’s pure coincidence,” she said.

  “But you did have an affair with Collins?”

  “My husband was having a string of affairs, several simultaneously. I needed someone…to give me back my self-esteem…I needed someone to…cherish and be cherished by.”

  The thought of anyone being cherished by Howard Collins made Silver blink. “Cherish?” he said.

  “Love is too strong a word. I didn’t want to love Mr Collins nor did I want him to love me.”

  “Does love fri
ghten you?”

  “Don’t be silly! Of course not. What I’m saying is that when something like that happens…I mean when one’s husband goes off with another woman, there’s a vacuum. One needs to fill it.”

  “But you did have someone who could have filled it and given you love and whom you could have loved,” Macrae said.

  Mrs Healey drew heavily on the cigarette. “You mean Rachel?”

  “Yes, Rachel.”

  “I don’t want Rachel brought into this!”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I don’t. She has nothing to do with anything. She lives her own life.”

  “Did you ever love her? Macrae said brutally.

  She looked down at the cigarette. “My relationship with her is private.”

  Silver abruptly took her off on another tack. “Have you a photograph of your husband as a young man?”

  “I suppose so.” She rose and went over to a rose-wood cabinet and began to rummage in one of the drawers.

  Macrae scowled at Silver for interrupting the flow but Silver pretended not to notice. One thing he had learned from Macrae’s frontal interrogation method — rather like a siege gun — was that it was sometimes better to go off at tangents, change the subject, the pace, the thrust — and throw the person off guard.

  “It was taken about fifteen years ago,” she said.

  Silver saw a man he realised most women would have found good-looking; dark-haired, his face framed by the heavy sideboards that were fashionable in the early seventies. He was standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool with the water up to his waist. The top half of his body was well made, hairy, and powerful. On his shoulders, naked, was a little girl, snub-nosed and pretty. He was laughing and the picture would have been a perfect family snap but for the expression on the child’s face. It had a bleakness and an unhappiness which touched Silver immediately.

  “Rachel?” he said.

  She nodded. She must have been five or six.”

  Silver passed it to Macrae then said matter-of-factly, “Did she like the water?”

  “Loved it.”

  “She doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself.”

  Mrs Healey compressed her lips.