Going It Alone

by Michael Innes

  ‘Oh, just as such things always are discovered. When the bank people arrived and opened up in the morning.’

  ‘We seem to know how the robbers entered the bank. But how did they leave it?’

  ‘By the same route, I imagine. It’s probably not much easier to leave a locked up bank than to enter it. So they’d have retreated down their tunnel with their booty. But this is just what chaps are saying. The fuzz keep mum.’

  ‘No doubt. And once the thieves were back on the squatters’ ground they could slip away unobserved and more or less at once, even lugging their booty with them?’

  ‘Well, not exactly staggering under crates of bullion, I suppose. But in a general way, yes. There would always be a lot of free coming and going, and nobody taking much notice. There was me, for instance. I was there overnight, but happened to leave very early in the morning. The police hadn’t a cordon round the place, you know, simply because there were squatters in it. It would be quite illegal to try to prevent people going in and out.’

  It didn’t seem to Averell that much of this was very illuminating, and he wondered what plan of action, if any, was forming in his companions’ minds. Their present surroundings he continued to find depressing. It was a long time, for one thing, since he’d eaten potato chips. And, for another, the fat woman was still staring at him. Or perhaps he was imagining this. Perhaps she was staring at each of them in turn. Did they look in any marked degree peculiar or out of the way? He had no idea.

  ‘I haven’t quite got hold of the timescale,’ Lou was saying, ‘except that we seem to be hearing about it all a bit belatedly. And, just like Gilbert, I come back to all those arrests.’ (Averell was surprised but unoffended at hearing himself thus familiarly referred to.) ‘If the thieves could walk out – just as Dave walked out – they would walk out. So the arrests were sheer unwarranted harrassment. Somebody should ask a question about them in the House of Commons.’

  ‘No good coming back to the bees in our own bonnets,’ Tim said a little unexpectedly. ‘The crooks might still have been lurking in the bag, as Uncle Gilbert says, when the police piled in and found the tunnel. I don’t think that a charge that the fuzz had been high-handed would meet with much public sympathy. Particularly as everybody may well have been let go by now. It seems to me that our first job is to get clued up on just that.’

  At this moment the fat woman (who was unaccompanied by any male escort) made a move, getting ponderously to her feet and waddling towards an exit. Her route took her past the table occupied by the party from Boxes, and as she came abreast of them she put out a hand and very impudently ruffled Dave’s hair. Or that was the appearance of the thing. Dave, not unnaturally, was displeased. But, although pale with anger, he sat tight and did nothing – which was precisely what one would have expected (Averell reflected) of so evidently well-bred a young man. And it was only when the fat woman had vanished that Anne spoke.

  ‘She’s left something,’ Anne said. ‘Posted it, you might say.’

  At this Dave ran his own hand through his hair, which was certainly sufficiently abundant for what had been the fat woman’s purpose. It came away holding a small twist of paper, which he unrolled, studied briefly, and then handed round his companions. It bore a brief message, scrawled in pencil:

  Get lost, Dirtylocks! Nose out, see? Or else…

  To this succinct message a roughly sketched skull and crossbones had been appended by way of signature.

  ‘Well, well! Dave said, with what appeared to be genuine calm. ‘My turn now. And rather like the Black Spot in Treasure Island. Who’d suppose an old soul like that to be of a literary inclination? Anne my dear, please rearrange my coiffure for me.’

  Anne at once performed this service unaffectedly with a pocket comb. Neither she nor any of the others ventured to comment on the unfairness of the fat woman’s derogatory appellation.

  ‘Now we’ll be moving,’ Tim said briefly.

  ‘Do we know where to?’ Lou asked.

  ‘To wherever we can find some of those squatters, for a start.’ Tim was quite clear about this. ‘Even if it’s in quod. We need a lot more in the way of first-hand impressions of what went on. Even Dave was like me – only in on it in a marginal way, it seems.’

  ‘Let’s think about Dave now,’ Lou said. ‘About what has just happened, I mean. Why should those people add him to their death-list? He hasn’t been taking photographs. Or if he has we haven’t been told about it.’

  ‘Never took a photograph in my life,’ Dave said. ‘It’s a middle-class habit. A bourgeois habit, I mean.’

  ‘And you haven’t exactly been added to a death-list,’ Tim said. ‘They’ve just warned you off. It was me who was on a death-list. But they didn’t tell me so. They just had a couple of goes at me straight away, and I pretty well expect another any minute. It may be said they’ve gone soft on Dave. I wonder why?’

  ‘Perhaps because he’s so adorable,’ Lou said.

  ‘Nonsense! I’m adorable too. Anne, aren’t I adorable?’

  ‘If you are, you’re an idiot as well.’ Anne was finding this gaiety unseasonable. ‘And listen! Unless I’ve got it wrong, there’s one big difference between Tim and Dave. Tim, just when did that letter-bomb thing arrive on you?’

  ‘First post Monday.’

  ‘Well, that’s one fact. Dave, what about the break-in at the bank?’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I made that clear? I thought I told Tim on the blower. Tuesday in the small hours.’

  ‘Exactly! And there’s the difference between our two heroes. They try to kill Tim just before their robbery. And they start threatening Dave a couple of days after it. And just threatening. We still don’t know what to make of that.’

  ‘A branch of the gang,’ Anne said, ‘that believes in milder courses than the lot who had a go at Tim.’

  ‘I’m not exactly flattered.’ Dave said this without any apparent humorous intention. ‘It’s rather a slight, really – as if I can be scared and Tim couldn’t be. I wonder.’

  This produced a moment’s silence, and then Tim spoke robustly.

  ‘Utter rot!’ Tim said. ‘And anyway, it remains true, broadly speaking, that the villains now have both of us on their shopping list.’

  ‘I don’t know that that is quite necessarily so.’ Averell said this rapidly, conscious that for him a moment of truth had come. ‘And, in order to explain what I mean, I’m afraid I must tell you about something extremely silly – and, in a way, totally irrelevant to this present business. I have a French friend called Georges.’ Averell paused on this, aware that it sounded quite idiotic. ‘Tim, I think you met him once when you were visiting me in Paris.’

  ‘The prince chap, who’s the split image of you, Uncle Gilbert?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And on this occasion, as it happens, I’ve come to England as him.’

  ‘You’ve what?’ Tim was goggling at his uncle. And so was everybody else – very much (Averell thought) as if he had suddenly been transmogrified into a two-headed calf.

  ‘And he has gone off to Italy as me. It hasn’t been exactly a wager; rather what we used to call, when I was young, a dare.’ Averell felt that he might decently soften the truth by sticking to this aspect of the thing. It was a genuine aspect in its way. ‘And then something very odd seems to have happened. It’s particularly odd since Georges isn’t a married man.’ Averell paused again, conscious that this trend in his attempted narrative was alarming his nephew a good deal. ‘Somebody must have decided to have Georges followed – trailed or shadowed, that is, by the sort of person who is called a private enquiry agent.’

  ‘Do you mean a private eye?’ Lou asked.

  ‘I suppose I do. And this one goes by the name – it’s really quite preposterous – of Gustave Flaubert. He caught up with me on the plane from Paris, and in one way and another follow
ed me to Boxes. Anne, you now understand a little about this, don’t you? Because of what happened in the garden, I mean.’

  ‘Do I? Yes, perhaps.’ Anne sounded a shade grim. ‘Just who could have hired this person?’

  ‘I think it must have been a jealous mistress.’ Averell was not at all sure that it was proper to admit to the existence of mistresses, jealous or otherwise, in the presence of young English gentlewomen. ‘At first I thought that Georges was playing some sort of practical joke on me. He’s quite capable of it. But it can’t be that. It’s some woman who hopes to have Georges detected in – well, in an alternative irregular situation.’

  ‘With a rival tart, you mean?’ Lou asked baldly.

  ‘Just that. It was Flaubert, of course, who peered in at the drawing-room window soon after I arrived at Boxes. And who climbed up to my bedroom window in the night. He wasn’t one of this gang, mistaking my room for Tim’s, as Tim and I thought. He was really after me in what’s called a compromising situation. There was a sudden blaze of light woke me up, and that I vaguely took to be lightning. But it was Flaubert having a go with a flashlight camera.’

  ‘You mean,’ Dave asked with wholesome amusement, ‘that he hoped to snap you in bed, enarming a new mistress – “you” being, of course, supposed to be this prince person?’

  ‘Yes, precisely that. It’s all most disagreeable.’

  ‘It’s all bloody funny, if you ask me. Is there any more of it, Mr Averell?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ It was Anne who broke in with this. She was probably conscious that in the regard of Tim’s elderly uncle the most embarrassing aspect of the story was yet to come. ‘The man did get a photograph – this morning. And he was so cheered that he put on an impudent turn on the strength of it. It so happened, you see, that Gilbert and I were sitting in a rather romantic arbour – or, at least, a summerhouse – and that I was blubbering on his shoulder, so that what Dave calls enarming was to be snapped for the asking. So Flaubert has his evidence that this prince man has skipped over to England for immoral purposes.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Dave said. ‘And good on you, Anne.’

  ‘I certainly agree that it’s a thoroughly absurd story, Uncle Gilbert.’ It was clear that Tim thought it distinctly unbecoming as well. ‘It’s the sort of thing that might happen to Mr Pickwick, or somebody like that. But I don’t see that it has much to do –’

  ‘God, Tim Barcroft, don’t be so thick!’ Dave exclaimed. ‘The point of it is that you were not followed to Boxes. It was your uncle who was followed to Boxes. Get?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But –’

  ‘And that means there’s no evidence that they’ve added me to you. They’ve substituted me for you. You’re passé, chum – entirely old-hat. And why? Well, forget about this Flaubert and his photographs, and think about yours. The relevant hunt-ball group of this gang of crooks. And the whole lot you took at Uffington Street. Where are they now?’

  ‘Where are they? In ashes, of course. Everything photographic I possessed went west in that big bang and the healthy baby fire that followed.’

  ‘Well, well, well. And did you hasten to tell anybody that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But I made a kind of inventory before I quit the flat and went home. I felt I was being businesslike in regard to the insurance, and so on. Only later I rather forgot about it. I must just have left it there.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Tim! Anybody can walk into that flat.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘These people now know the bomb didn’t get you – nor the car either. But they also know the photographs were destroyed, and they’re prepared to call it a day.’

  ‘All right.’ Tim managed a faint grin. ‘With me they are. But now it’s you.’

  ‘And why, oh why?’ Lou said. ‘When we get that we get somewhere. Let’s move.’

  13

  Perhaps because in France his acquaintance covered a fairly wide social spectrum (including characters like the Prince de Silistrie), Averell was not without experience of being driven furiously around in powerful cars. Even so, he was at times a shade alarmed by Dave’s performance on the final stretch of the M4. Dave kept in the fast lane, and was far from patient when held up on it because a car in front of him was trundling along at the mere permitted maximum of seventy miles an hour. On these occasions his use of a powerful if melodious horn was more vigorous than a proper courtesy would have allowed. Dave was no doubt eager to get cracking at what they were going to take a crack at (whatever this might be, for the matter remained disturbingly obscure). But it was also possible to feel that Dave was being more venturesome than he would normally be because he judged that it was up to him to vindicate himself in some way. He had possibly been irked by Anne’s little joke about the gang’s supposing him to be vulnerable to ‘milder courses’ than those they had directed against Tim. Young men, after all, are very sensitive to any aspersion cast upon their courage. Anne, indeed, hadn’t intended anything of the sort. It had been Dave himself who had twisted her remark that way. And this in itself was indicative. Averell made a mental note to try to keep a cautious eye on Dave. The boy might be prone to exhibit what a reader of Joseph Conrad would call the Lord Jim syndrome: to do a rash thing the moment an opportunity so to do turned up. Tim had been a little like this when he had insisted on wandering around the garden at Boxes waving a torch in face of what he had believed to be the possibility of lethal attack. Tim would be the more circumspect of the two young men, all the same. There was nothing particularly admirable about circumspection in itself. But it was to be commended, surely, when one happened to be toting around a couple of young women in the interest of running to earth a band of atrocious criminals.

  These thoughts did credit to Gilbert Averell as an elderly person of chivalrous disposition. At the same time he was aware that he might more profitably be addressing his mind to something else: namely, to finding some persuasive means of bringing the entire freelance operation within the ambit of the law. But this was difficult, since all four of his companions were in the grip of another syndrome which might reasonably be associated with the name of Robin Hood. They were a band of jolly outlaws, intent on righting wrong without any recourse to a Sheriff of Nottingham or his latter-day equivalent in, say, an office at Scotland Yard.

  Could he venture to tell them that they were in a muddle? They clearly had no strong feelings about a large-scale depredation visited upon a bank. Dave (rushing around in his expensive car) was probably quite capable of asserting roundly that all property was theft, and that if anybody lost out as a result of the raid (and it was the paradoxical truth that nobody in the world would at all intimately do so) it served them right for hoarding wealth that ought to be common to all. (This was a highly speculative assumption on Averell’s part, since in fact he knew little about either the minds of young people in general or the minds of the particular batch of young people with whom chance had so oddly implicated him.) What really commanded Tim and his friends was the sense that a harmless section of society – to wit, persons deprived of homes through no fault of their own – had been pounced on by the police and huddled off to unwarranted incarceration. Averell found he couldn’t very readily associate himself with this feeling – or not if, as he judged probable, this had been a temporary measure now liquidated. If one ‘squatted’ one couldn’t very reasonably resent certain occasional inconveniences to result.

  But this was a persuasion which he could not perhaps without indiscretion admit to. And there was, of course, the absurd fact that, within the Queen’s realm, he was at the moment something of an outlaw himself. He hadn’t honestly admitted to this. He had fudged the full facts of his present embarrassing and unseemly position. So he now found himself cursing his wholly agreeable friend Georges’ fantastic sense of fun.

  ‘We’ll drive straight to Uffington Street,’ Dave said, ‘and see if any of th
e wretches have been allowed to return there. Tim, you agree?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ But as Tim said this he had glanced for a moment at his uncle, as if from a sense that the senior member of the party ought to have been consulted first. This unthinking impulse of deference merely served to make Averell yet more ill at ease in his anomalous position, and he rather wished that he had stayed put at Boxes and left these four young people to their adventure. But had he done so he would immediately have felt himself to be irresponsibly deserting them. Or he would have felt this had he not contacted the police the moment they had driven off; and that was something they would have regarded as plain treachery. There was nothing for it but to bear his part. So he spoke up again now.

  ‘Will any of them have been let go back to this empty house?’ he asked. ‘Even, I mean, when they’ve been entirely cleared of having anything to do with the robbery. I’d suppose that once squatters were out they’d be kept out. Or at least that the owner of the place would come along and bar it all up.’

  ‘It’s the law again, Uncle Gilbert,’ Tim said – and with his customary air of being an authority on this subject. ‘The various forms of trespass are extremely dodgy, and the fuzz are always looking over their own silly shoulders at their own silly legal advisors. They’re scared of chaps in the Home Office, and scared of crusty old judges dozing away on their benches and in their chambers. So they go in for cunning inactivity a good deal.’

  ‘What we need is cunning of an active order,’ Lou said.