by Evelyn James
At this statement, Bramble, lifted his head from his basket.
“Needs must,” Clara reminded her. “I am sure Tommy is fine. He will be keeping warm at the morgue.”
The lad started at this statement and looked alarmed. Clara ignored him.
“I shall try not to be long, but this is urgent,” she insisted to Annie.
Annie huffed to herself.
“Well, I don’t know what to make of the lot of you,” she grumbled, then stalked off to the kitchen.
Clara let her go, deciding now was not the time to begin an argument. She had to get after Alf while she could, for the sake of Jeremiah. If she lost the man now, there was no knowing when she would hear of him again.
“Are you ready?” She asked the lad.
“Yes,” he said, that look of alarm still in his eyes.
“I don’t bite,” Clara promised him. “Make sure you keep that shilling safe. Now, let’s brave this weather.”
Stepping outside again, Clara was reminded of just how cold it had become. She was wearing sturdy galoshes to protect her feet, and she sank down to her ankles as soon as she stepped onto the path. The world was quiet, the snow falling silently all around. There was not a cat or bird stirring, which caused Clara to reflect that Annie had had a point when she called her a fool.
The lad clapped his hands together, the new gloves helping to brace him from the cold at least. He had no hat and the snow was falling onto his bare hair and melting.
“Let’s get moving and warm up,” Clara suggested.
They walked without speaking for some time. The cold snatched their breath away and the effort of marching through the snow made conversation a luxury they could not afford. In some places, the snow lay thicker than others and it was like walking through a wall of ice to get through it. Clara’s long coat was soon soaked at the bottom and her feet within her galoshes were numb. The lad at her side huddled up into himself as best he could and looked miserable. His trousers were drenched, and he was shivering from head to foot.
When they reached a corner, Clara made him pause and placed him in the lee of a building, where the snow had not fully laid. She rubbed his gloved hands with hers, making him grumble in embarrassment, though he did not pull away.
Clara looked around for ideas to help him further. She noticed that the bakery was still open, so she asked him to wait out of the snow and headed off to buy him a warm pastry. When she returned, she placed a steaming meat pasty in his hands.
“Once you have that inside you, let’s take some of the narrower roads to reach the pub. They should be less snowy than the main roads and they might cut out this biting wind.”
“Why are you doing all this?” The lad looked at her suspiciously, not touching his pasty.
“Because I can,” Clara informed him, “and because I want to. You need these things. I won’t have you freezing to death on my watch. Annie would never forgive me.”
The boy did not look satisfied with her answer, but he ate his pasty, nonetheless.
Following Clara’s suggestion, they stuck to the narrow alleys and cut throughs that turned the backstreets of Brighton into a warren of tiny roads. The snow was indeed thinner here, the tight spaces having made it harder for it to fall and lay so thickly. In a few places it had managed to form drifts that blocked their route, but on the whole, it was easier going. Of course, given time, the snow would penetrate these byways too and there would be no escaping it.
“What is your name?” Clara asked the lad as they hurried along.
“Iain,” he said.
“Do you live around here?”
“I don’t answer questions,” Iain said firmly.
“Fair enough,” Clara said to appease him. She didn’t want to lose what fragile trust they had already formed. “I am not a threat to you, just so you know. I am a private detective. I solve problems for people.”
Iain did not respond.
“Alf Martin is not in trouble,” she continued. “I just need to know what Ethel Dickinson gave him the other night.”
Iain snorted.
“You don’t believe me. I understand. I am a stranger to you and not from this area. I am from a different part of this world we live in and there is no reason why you should trust me,” Clara wondered why she was bothering, but somehow she felt she must. “I like helping people, especially when they might otherwise never get the justice they deserve. I believe in fairness, but I also know the world isn’t fair.”
Clara sighed.
“Here I am spouting all this nonsense which you already know. By a fluke of fate, I was born into a comfortable home, to parents who could afford to keep their children fed and warm at all times. In contrast, you find yourself here,” Clara wasn’t sure she was making things better by her ramblings. She was getting no response from Iain. “I started out lucky, that gives me a head start, but I don’t believe that luck is a purely random thing. I think we can make our own.”
“You really talk too much,” Iain snarled at her.
“Yes, that I do,” Clara chuckled.
They were quiet for a few paces, then Iain spoke.
“But the pasty was nice, thanks.”
“Just like the shilling, you earned it for undertaking this errand in this weather.”
They were drawing close to the pub. Clara smiled to herself as she noticed there was now a sign hanging outside. Whether it was the original, or something one of the regulars had quickly knocked up, she could not say. It portrayed a very crudely drawn lion in heavy red paint.
“This is where I stop,” Iain came to a halt, and kicked his feet at the snow on the cobbles. “I ought to get home.”
“If you can, get warm,” Clara said to him with a touch of concern. “Do you have a change of clothes?”
Iain shrugged.
“I’m sorry I was the reason you had to come out in this snow and get so wet and cold,” Clara said, meaning her words. “Though I do appreciate it.”
“Yeah, well, I got a shilling and gloves out of it,” Iain wouldn’t meet her eye, still shuffling his feet.
“If they fall apart, you must bring those gloves back to me and I shall make you a better pair,” Clara tried to elicit a smile from him. “I am really not very good at knitting just yet, but I shall persevere.”
“Yeah,” Iain said weakly.
He had caught a glimpse of some other lads who had appeared from an alley and were looking across at him with curiosity. It seemed to Clara he did not want to get caught up with them. He shuffled his feet one last time, debated whether to say goodbye, then bolted off away from her and the other lads. Clara glanced across the street at the youths who had a nasty look about them. They were watching her with blatant intimidation. Clara gave them a warm smile and then walked into the pub.
She might have hoped that the pub would be warmer than the world outside, but in this Clara was to be disappointed. The pub interior, if anything, was colder, though its customers seemed to be compensating for the chill by consuming large quantities of alcohol. A few looked up at her entry, but the curiosity they had shown the other day was now absent. Her novelty had faded in the face of snow and beer.
Clara headed to the landlord who she assumed was Fat Sam; he had not offered her his name the other day. He caught her eye and a glimmer of avarice came into his eyes. He was thinking about what he might earn for telling her Alf had appeared.
“He is in the back room,” he said in a low whisper when Clara was close enough. “He was in a bad way.”
Clara frowned.
“What has happened to him?”
The landlord shrugged at her.
“None of my business,” his tone was defensive. “Now, do you want to see him?”
“Naturally,” Clara replied.
The landlord opened the flap in his bar counter that enabled a person to pass through and motioned for Clara to follow. With nothing to lose, Clara obeyed.
Chapter Twenty
Alf Martin was
not quite what she had expected; she had thought he would be a self-confident loner, someone comfortable in his own skin and content in his own company. That was how he had been described. A man who knew his own mind and liked to do things his way, which was why he could not remain under his mother’s roof.
She had not envisaged a little beanpole of a man, with flitting eyes that never seemed to stay still and hair that hung in lank locks to his shoulders. A scruffy beard, that was patchy in places as if Alf had been randomly shaved, graced his chin and gave him the look of some long-ago hermit, or perhaps a castaway on a desert island.
His clothes consisted of an old army greatcoat, upon the breast of which was a string of medals. It seemed sound reasoning that these belonged to Alf; he was the right age to have served in the army.
Fat Sam noticed Clara’s frown as she looked upon the shabby individual she had been trying to find for so long.
“Hasn’t been the same since the war,” the landlord whispered to her. “Not that he was altogether of sound mind before then. Tread lightly, he doesn’t do well with people. Think the only reason he appeared here was because he was cold.”
The landlord’s sympathetic tone surprised Clara. He had not seemed the sort to have empathy for others, certainly he gave no quarter to his other customers, but Alf Martin seemed to have found a soft spot within him. Clara now understood why he had been so reluctant to tell her about Alf – he had been protecting him.
“Mr Martin,” Clara walked forward and offered her hand. Alf glanced at it but did not move his own hands from where they were clasped in his lap. “I am Clara Fitzgerald, a private detective. I have some difficult news about Ethel Dickinson.”
“Ethel?” Alf drew his mind back to the present. His eyes stopped flitting as if he was a hunted man constantly looking for danger, and he lifted his head a little. He had been hunched over in a chair, hands clutched together, looking cold and scared. Now he became confident and composed. It could almost have appeared as if another man entirely had taken his place.
“Ethel became very ill not long after you saw her, a hard fever. I am sorry to say she has passed on,” Clara explained, knowing there was no way to soften the news and thinking it better to be blunt.
Alf turned his head away, stared into space.
“It was wet that night. I said she would catch a chill. She never listened.”
“Were you friends?” Clara asked.
Alf unclenched his hands and moved back in his seat.
“Not exactly. I don’t really have friends.”
“You have me, Alf,” the landlord said with a sad glint in his eye. He was hurt that he was not considered a friend.
“Yes,” Alf said distantly. “I suppose.”
“I need to ask you about the biscuit tin Ethel brought to you the night you saw her. It is very important,” Clara persisted. “You traded it for a pawn ticket.”
“Yes,” Alf nodded. “A pawn ticket for workman’s tools. They weren’t mine, you see. I was given them by Ethel’s brother as payment for letting him hideout in my home for a while.”
“You shouldn’t have done that Alf,” the landlord said with a rumble of disapproval. “Those Dickinson lads are trouble, always have been. You don’t want to get mixed up with them.”
Alf shrug.
“He needed somewhere to stay. The police wanted him. He asked me and I didn’t mind. I was going home to mother for a bit, anyway,” Alf’s tone was strangely monotone, he added no inflections to his words and there was an eerie calm to everything he said. It made it seem as if the real Alf was a long way away, and this thing that looked like him, was just some automaton that repeated his words. “As thanks for letting him stay in my house, he gave me those work tools. Said if the police caught up with him, he wouldn’t be needing them anyway.”
“Then you pawned them?” Clara said.
Alf shrugged.
“I needed the money for food,” he spread his hands out, what could he do, the gesture said. “I don’t have work all the time.”
“Alf is a very good bricklayer,” the landlord intervened, trying to improve Clara’s impression of the man. “When there is work on, you can find no better man. He is punctual and efficient. But there hasn’t been the work lately.”
“Bricklaying is soothing,” Alf said with the faintest hint of pleasure creeping into his otherwise unemotional voice. “But the tools Dickinson left me weren’t right for me. They were for carpentry and plumbing. Nothing I could make use of. When I needed food, it made sense to pawn them.”
“You did nothing wrong,” the landlord quickly told him, though Alf had offered no indication that he was in any way troubled by what he had done. “They were yours to pawn.”
“Mr Dickinson was found by the police,” Clara interjected. “And he went to prison.”
“Eighteen months for getting involved in a fight right outside my pub,” the landlord elaborated. “He started it too, saw it all for myself. It turned into a bloody brawl, windows were smashed, people hurt, property damaged. Several fellows ended up being arrested and charged, but I never saw any compensation for my windows.”
The landlord huffed to himself in annoyance.
“And might this incident have occurred around nineteen or twenty months ago?” Clara asked.
The landlord frowned, calculating the time that had passed in his head.
“Yes, now you mention it. Dickinson must be finishing his sentence soon.”
“This coming Friday,” Alf intervened. “That’s why Emily needed the tools back. He had promised her to go straight after his release.”
“Yeah, and the Angel Gabriel will be popping in my pub tonight,” the landlord snorted. “The Dickinsons don’t know what ‘going straight’ is. Oh, their mother tries, does her best and I can’t fault her. Don’t think she has ever set foot in a pub all her days. But their old man was trouble and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Alf seemed unaffected by this talk, perhaps he was telling the truth when he said he did not have friends. Maybe he no longer had the capacity within him to understand and nurture friendship with others.
“Still, Ethel was hopeful,” Clara said. “And she wanted those tools back.”
“I had to trade for them,” Alf told her. “I couldn’t just give that ticket away. It was worth something and I don’t exactly have a lot.”
“I am not judging you for trading the ticket,” Clara promised him. “I can understand the necessity. What I want to know is what Ethel offered you for it.”
Alf’s brows creased in consternation and for the first time he showed the deeply guarded emotions that ran within him.
“It’s mine,” he said, and his voice had hardened.
Clara had not foreseen this; she had assumed the trade had been purely a business dealing and that Alf had intended to sell Jeremiah on. She had not supposed that Alf might actually want the tortoise.
“The problem is, Alf, Ethel did not own what she gave you,” Clara said gently. “And now it has been missed.”
The landlord startled and a look of panic came into his eyes.
“You see, Alf, nothing good comes from those Dickinsons. They are always up to no good.”
Alf merely shook his head and Clara sensed she was losing him. He would shut down, disappear into himself and when the opportunity arose, vanish into the night. It could be weeks before they saw him again.
“I’m sorry to have been so stern, Alf,” Clara tried changing tack. “Why don’t we begin again? Ethel brought you a biscuit tin, yes?”
Alf clutched his hands together again, long, bony fingers wrapped agitatedly around each other. The confident Alf had drifted away, replaced by the anxious, scared individual who Clara had seen when she first entered the room.
There was simply no denying that Alf was a broken man. Whatever had happened to him during the war – and Clara could guess at some of it, as she knew enough from Tommy and O’Harris – it had left permanent emotiona
l scars. Alf might never recover himself fully, that might not be possible. Instead, he coped by running from the world when things became too much, hiding from everyone and shutting himself off from other people. He had attempted to reduce his emotions to nothing, and he scorned friendship, as friends were people who could die and hurt you as a result.
Clara wished there was something she could do for him, equally, she hated that he had been put into this position by Ethel. Had Ethel planted the idea for a pet tortoise into his mind? Once the notion was fixed, he could not let it go. Yet Jeremiah was never Ethel’s to give away and Clara did not think that the lifestyle Alf lived was one within which a tortoise would thrive. Alf could not know how to look after Jeremiah, he did not have the right resources to keep him suitably fed and housed. How could she persuade him of that?
“Ethel took that tin from the people she worked for,” Clara continued. “Her mother had never seen it before, and Ethel tried to keep it hidden from her.”
“Stolen!” The landlord hissed. “Are you listening Alf?”
“Now, I can see why you would want him, but Jeremiah belongs to the Malorys and has to be returned.”
“Jeremiah?” Alf did not look at her, and the question was almost a statement, it was so dully spoken.
“The tortoise,” Clara explained. “His name is Jeremiah.”
Alf was silent a while. He became very still and seemed almost to have slipped into a type of seizure. Clara had witnessed patients with epilepsy do something similar while she was working as a nurse in the war. They would suddenly become as motionless as statues and appear lost to the world. She was beginning to wonder if part of Alf’s problems were also due to mild epilepsy or something similar.
When he had not spoken in some time, she looked to the landlord for help.
“He does this from time to time,” the landlord told her, unperturbed. “He’ll come back in a moment and will carry on as if nothing happened.”
All they could do was wait before the living statue that was Alf Martin. There was not a twitch or tremor from him. He did not even blink. Clara was growing concerned for his wellbeing, when suddenly he took a deep intake of breath and shuddered.