Going It Alone

by Michael Innes

  ‘They come in various shapes and sizes. Sometimes crooks simply dash into a bank waving guns, and grab what they can and depart again. Fairly primitive, that – and not likely to result in a big haul. Then there’s the trick of hiding in the place overnight, and pouncing on some wretched understrapper when he opens up in the morning. And, of course, there’s all sorts of stuff with hostages. It’s astonishing what you can do with an advanced technique there. Make the manager drive up with the keys in his shiny car, and depart in the shiny car yourselves when you’ve cleared the place out. But then it’s fifty-fifty there will be a chase, and when that happens the odds are on the police.’ Anne paused in this well-informed discourse to admire some primroses. ‘But the really superior method is tunnelling. You start from, say, an empty shop near by; keep on burrowing and burrowing like a mole; and if you emerge at the right spot all you have to do is turn the key deftly in the oiled wards. I think Keats or somebody put it that way.’

  ‘He well may have. But are you saying, Anne, that this affair has probably been like that?’

  ‘Yes, I am – and that when the police got into the bank’s vault or whatever it was, and worked back through the tunnel, they found themselves in the middle of this idiotic squat. So they naturally nicked everybody they could lay their hands on.’

  They had reached the summerhouse, which faced into the sun. Anne dusted down a bench as carefully as if she had been in a ball-dress, and perched herself on it.

  ‘Romantic seclusion,’ she said, ‘but I’m not expecting a declaration. Sit down too, Mr Averell, and tell me what you think.’

  ‘I think you may well prove to be right.’ Averell sat down as he was bidden, although not without a fear that the bench might be a little damp. ‘But it doesn’t take us far with what we have really to think about.’

  ‘Which is just what connection all this has with people wanting to kill Tim? There must be a connection, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d rather imagine so. But I’m not at all clear about his role, Anne. He doesn’t seem to have been particularly closely connected with this squat – if that’s what it’s called. Was he simply going to do a report on it?’

  ‘More or less that – though mostly it would have been his photographs. And it was just to be part of a series. The idea was to show squatting and sitting in and so forth in the rather domestic and civilized way it usually happens. People get the impression that squatters pee on the carpet, and get drunk and quarrel, and end by breaking everything up. So there was to be lots of good humour and co-operative effort and listening to Bach as well as pop. It was to be a public relations exercise of sorts. Say a counter-blast to the media.’

  ‘I see. And Tim mayn’t really have known all that much about this particular crowd?’

  ‘No, he needn’t. And I don’t know how often he went round there. I haven’t been hearing an awful lot about his movements lately, as a matter of fact.’

  Averell considered this for a moment in silence. He had already been wondering whether perhaps Tim didn’t care about Anne as much as Anne cared about Tim. He resolved to steer clear of this if he could. It decidedly wasn’t territory upon which an elderly relation could trespass to any good effect.

  ‘Just before that telephone call came,’ he said, ‘Tim seemed about to give me the results of a kind of diary of his recent movements. But I didn’t get the impression he’d recalled anything significant. The real puzzle, in a way, is his being so puzzled.’

  ‘Yes, something must have happened without his realizing its significance – like what you said about a man in a tube train. When he was being a bit dopey, perhaps.’

  ‘Dopey?’ Averell repeated, alarmed.

  ‘No, no – just being dreamy. Would you say Tim was rather thick?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Averell found himself resenting this sudden sharp question. ‘It is the general expectation at Oxford that Tim will take a most creditable degree.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be super?’ Anne asked ironically. But it was evident that she was pleased. ‘If he ever gets as far as the examination room,’ she said. ‘But remember that they do have it in for him. They may really put him in prison this time.’ As she faced this dire possibility, Anne broke most unexpectedly into tears.

  Averell was appalled. He would have been distressed merely by the bobbing up once more of the shocking notion that the police could ‘have it in’ for his nephew. But to have a young woman weeping on his bosom in a secluded situation was infinitely alarming. And it was on his bosom. Quite instinctively he had put an arm round the weeping girl in what he judged vaguely to be an avuncular manner, and she had promptly responded by burying her nose in the region of his breast-pocket handkerchief.

  ‘My dear Anne –’ he began – and suddenly stiffened and straightened up. From somewhere close at hand, in fact from just outside the summerhouse, had come a most alarming sound. It was the sharp click! surely to be associated (Averell thought) with the cocking of a pistol, if pistols are in fact things one does cock. He was uncertain about this – but in no doubt of the resurgence of what a writer of romance might entitle Peril at Boxes. Here was the enemy again: the prowler of the previous afternoon, the intruder at the bedroom window, the ruffian who had so outrageously bashed him on the nose. And Averell’s duty was plain. Standing as he did the sole protector of the girl at his side from an assailant who might be sheerly mad, it was his duty once more to grapple with him as he could. Averell disengaged himself from Anne (who was a little bewildered and unwilling to let go), sprang to his feet, and undauntedly dashed from the summerhouse. And at this Anne for some reason decided that it was her duty to follow, so that the two tumbled out of the place almost together. It was at once evident that the miscreant was not meditating a more effective attack, since he was in fact plainly visible retreating rapidly down the garden path. Perhaps, Averell resourcefully thought, that click had been the sound made by a pistol when it goes abruptly out of working order. At least the man was now a fugitive. And he was to be pursued.

  The man ran, Averell ran, and Anne ran too. Anne, ashamed of her moment of womanly weakness, was showing herself a tough girl. She was still at Averell’s shoulder when Averell caught up with his quarry. This he succeeded in doing only because the fugitive made a mistake, turning down a path that proved to be a blind alley. Unless he showed fight and got the better of the encounter, he was cornered at last! Averell, whose blood was up, had no intention of being worsted.

  But now the fugitive, realizing that he could no further go, halted and turned round. Averell halted too, and even more abruptly. For here was none other than Monsieur Gustave Flaubert, his vexatious acquaintance of the flight from Paris. And Flaubert, as if making the best of things, was entirely composed. He was wearing his silly little hat of the previous day, and this silly little hat he now elevated in air, while at the same time making a courteous bow.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur le Prince,’ Flaubert murmured (as one might to an acquaintance in the Champs Elysées, or some such place). And he glided past Averell’s shoulder and walked collectedly away.

  ‘Just what was that in aid of, Mr Averell?’ Anne asked. ‘I’m sorry that I turned so sappy, by the way.’

  ‘It was only natural,’ Averell said – much at random. ‘And – well, I thought I heard him doing something to a gun.’

  ‘You heard him doing something with a camera. He had it slung over his shoulder when we came up with him now. But I don’t understand this at all. He seemed to know you. Is that right? And then you seemed to feel that the sooner he just cleared out the better.’

  ‘I encountered him on an aeroplane yesterday. He is a most annoying person, and I certainly never want to see him again.’

  ‘He called you something funny, Mr Averell.’ Anne was looking at Tim’s uncle with momentary frank suspicion. ‘Only I didn’t quite catch it.’

  ‘He ca
lled me Monsieur le Prince.’ Averell came out with this quite firmly.

  ‘And are you a prince? Nobody told us, if you are. Of the Holy Roman Empire or something?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Averell positively snapped this out, since he had in fact become extremely embarrassed. ‘It is an absurd affair of mistaken identity, which it would take too long to explain. I think we had better return to the house.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with this bank robbery, and the attacks on Tim?’

  ‘So far as I can see, nothing whatever.’

  ‘Then why did he try to come at Tim last night in his bedroom?’

  ‘He didn’t. He had something quite different in view.’ As he said this, Averell began to walk rapidly back to the house, somewhat ungallantly leaving it to Anne to follow if she chose. He hadn’t quite worked it all out, but he had, as it were, got the idea. And to say another word about it now to this blameless child would just be too humiliating altogether.

  Part Two

  Uffington Street and Elsewhere

  12

  There was more telephoning, as a result of which the young man called Dave drove out from London to a rendezvous with the party from Boxes at a ‘service area’ on the M4 near Heathrow. It was a species of amenity for travellers quite unfamiliar to Gilbert Averell, although it might have been described as a somewhat graceless first cousin to places of roadside refreshment into which he had occasionally been introduced in both France and Italy. There were acres of parked cars, and further acres of coaches, and yet further acres of transport Juggernauts. And there was a complex of wash-places both for automobiles and humans at the core of which was a further complex of cafeterias and snack-bars and a scurrying restaurant in which the air was pervaded equally by deplorable music and a clatter of crockery. Harrassed men and women, mainly from distant quarters of the globe, swished out-size mops round your toes and swabbed down little tables under your nose; myriads of children howled for cokes and chips and fish fingers; brawny men gnawed pies.

  Tim had dismissed their hired car before making contact with Dave, and this, although a rational procedure, enhanced Averell’s sense that he had implicated himself with conspiratorial young persons. And Dave himself was perplexing. Averell couldn’t place him at all. His car was a large Bentley – a circumstance which, although it was of mature years, suggested a background of considerable substance. Again, although Dave’s hairstyle and attire suggested what Averell thought of as a hippie (or was it a beatnik?) much more than did anything about Tim and the two girls, he seemed to be basically the sort of young man whose notion of professional activity includes becoming an officer in the Brigade of Guards. This small social enigma was no doubt of very little consequence. Tim and Anne, after all (although not perhaps Lou), were in strict class terms out of the same drawer as this young man – although he might be rich, and Tim at least had some title to call himself poor. A social mix up (in what Averell told himself were his own archaic and hide-bound terms) was clearly judged agreeable and edifying in the coteries with which Tim had involved himself.

  They sat round an undersized table, drank an approximation to coffee, and ate the sandwiches which Lou had provided – together with several bags of crisps purchased on the spot. Averell, although not normally self-conscious, saw himself as awkwardly out of the picture. A fat woman at the next table kept staring at him in a wooden way. Almost certainly it was from no more than a kind of inert stupidity. But Averell actually found himself supposing that she was turning him over in her mind.

  ‘I keep on thinking,’ Dave said, ‘that I know what all this is about. And then it eludes me.’

  ‘And so do I, Dave.’ Tim seemed instantly to recognize in Dave some mental process akin to his own.

  ‘But Tim has what you might call the livelier interest,’ Lou said crisply. ‘They tried to murder him in or around the flat twice within an hour. And then they tracked him to Boxes too.’

  ‘I don’t think –’ Averell began, and then fell silent. If he took up this point at all it would merely confuse matters by introducing something totally irrelevant to the alarming happenings in London. He had already said as much as this to Anne, and he saw no reason to regard it as untrue. (Time was very rapidly to reveal a small factor of error in this. But Averell, being unendowed with any precognitive faculty, was unaware of the fact.)

  ‘But I believe I have got some way,’ Tim was saying, ‘in sorting the thing out. It’s a matter, for a start, of the character of this takeover of the Uffington Street house. I went there two or three times, you know, on account of the photographs and all that, and it didn’t strike me, somehow, as quite the usual thing.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Dave said.

  ‘It wasn’t going to make the public relations side of the job easy. Too few homeless chaps with wives and young kids to give the required key-note. The effect was more of a round-the-clock pop concert really. That’s a very good thing in its way, but there in Uffington Street it was a bit of a racket. Of course people were smoking this and that, and demi-semi-concealing themselves when suddenly feeling affectionate. I did a bit in a candid-camera way, since it seemed to be expected of me.’

  ‘Tim, how disgusting!’ Anne said sharply.

  ‘Oh, well – nothing exotic,’ Tim said easily. ‘And it isn’t my point that there was a certain amount of wantoning and chambering. Have you ever been to a hunt ball, Anne – or something of that kind?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘With me,’ Dave said. ‘Perhaps she has never told you, Tim. But Anne and I share a murky past in polite life.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Dave.’ Anne was clearly annoyed by this revelation. ‘Tim, go on.’

  ‘Well, you remember how there is always a photographer who snaps Mr A chatting with Lady B, and who huddles people into grinning groups all jollied up on caterers’ champagne. I did quite a lot of that one night in Uffington Street. One or another clutch of chums, you know. So you all see what’s in my head.’

  ‘At any rate, I do,’ Lou said. ‘You believe yourself to have photographed the gang that did the bank robbery – and they woke up to the undesirableness of the fact rather late.’

  ‘Just that, Lou. What a smart girl you are.’

  ‘It seems to me wholly improbable,’ Dave said. ‘I grant you that in all that squatting crowd, and with all the coming and going there was, a little gang of professional thieves might lurk. But if they were professionals they certainly wouldn’t line up smirking in front of the wonder-boy’s candid lens.’

  ‘It might depend on the champagne – or whatever was the equivalent of that.’ Averell offered this contribution to the debate considerably to his own surprise. ‘A mood of bravado may have overtaken them. Or they mayn’t even have known at the time what was going on. They may have been alerted to it afterwards.’

  ‘And decided to take care of the photographer,’ Anne said. ‘I suppose there are people as desperately wicked as that.’

  ‘Oh, most certainly,’ Dave said cheerfully. ‘And there would be big stakes in this affair. Then there’s another thing, and it makes me feel that perhaps Tim’s on the right track, after all. There probably aren’t all that many high-powered gangs able to tunnel their way into vaults and strong rooms. And at least some of them will be known already to the police. So if a crowd like that turned up in photographs taken by our young ace in Uffington Street, the fuzz would know just who they were looking for.’

  ‘But would it be possible,’ Averell asked, ‘for even three or four men to gate-crash this squat, and be around perhaps for several days, and pass undetected? And it would have to be for several days, if they really had a big burrowing operation on hand. And I don’t quite see how that could have been managed at all.’

  ‘For a start,’ Tim said, ‘the squat was a gate-crashing operation itself, in a way. And people drifted away from it and others ca
me in: that always happens in these affairs. And not everybody would be known to everybody else, by any means. And it’s really a very big house, with cellars and attics and what have you. No, it all seems quite feasible to me.’

  ‘What about the racket?’ Lou asked. ‘You can’t bore your way –’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ Tim was confident. ‘It sounds strange, and it must all be pretty laborious. But it’s certainly possible to excavate long tunnels as quietly as if you were moles yourselves. People did it to escape from prison camps, and they do it today to get into banks and shops and offices. Not a doubt about that. And what made a real row in Uffington Street was all those groups.’

  ‘Groups?’ Averell said.

  ‘Small bands, Uncle Gilbert. You might call a string quartet a group. Somebody brought one in, it seems, to brighten things up, and the idea caught on. There were visits from several more – for free, I imagine. One or two hung about for quite a long time.’

  ‘True enough,’ Dave said. ‘I gave one of them a hand, as a matter of fact. Quite nice chaps, but there were two or three others I know nothing about. I say! Isn’t a group much the same as a gang? There’s our answer, I do believe.’

  ‘But what about the answer thought up by the fuzz?’ Anne asked. ‘It’s our business to do something about that.’

  ‘I’ve an idea we ought to be thinking about the fuzz,’ Averell said – and was displeased to hear himself use this presumably derogatory term. What he was now wondering, was whether these young people were inclined a little to discount the intelligence of the forces of the law. ‘I mean,’ he went on cautiously, ‘that their minds may have been moving not altogether differently from our own. They may have seen the probability of professional criminals having mingled successfully with your squatting acquaintances, and may be detaining the whole lot simply in the hope that some process of sifting and identification may reveal the crooks as still lurking in the bag. In fact, I can’t take the notion of a wholesale charge of bank robbery against the lot of them at all seriously.’ Averell was gaining confidence as he spoke. ‘But we can’t really get very far without much more precise information than we seem to have. Have you any notion, Dave, of how the theft was discovered?’