Threats and Menaces

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘I’m never going to have a husband. You know what I call them?’

  ‘Husbands?’

  ‘No, the people down there. I call them Pavement People.’ And what do you call us?’

  ‘Sky Walkers.’

  ‘Sky Walkers. Yes, I suppose we are in a way. I live up here in the sky. I don’t go down much these days.’

  ‘I only go to school. Or when my father comes to take me out.’ ‘In Tibet they used to leave the dead out for the vultures to clean up. Called it a sky burial. Sometimes I wish… well, never mind.’ He moved slowly along the flower-beds dead-heading the geraniums and the pansies. He called goodbye and took the elevator down to his apartment.

  The sun was hot on the roof and Dory moved Princess Laksmi and Miss Gardenia to the tool shed. She wasn’t supposed to know where the key was hidden because Ralph put it in a different place whenever Mr Pargeter found it. It was under one of the geranium pots and Dory opened the shed and laid her blanket just inside the doorway in the shade. It was hot in the tool shed too.

  ‘It’s just hot everywhere,’ Dory said to Miss Gardenia.

  She gave them more coffee but soon became bored. She locked up the shed, replaced the key, and took the binoculars to the parapet. The house was dead and the square held nothing of interest for her. She could not even see the collared dove.

  She let the glasses roam around the buildings on its periphery. Douglas, the porter across at Rosemount, was standing on the top step, hands folded behind him. He always looked smarter than Trevor, Dory thought, but then Rosemount thought itself smarter than Selbourne, which wasn’t true.

  This part of Bayswater had been badly bombed during the war and most of the flats and houses had been built in the fifties and sixties. Nowadays it was mainly a quarter occupied by rich Arabs.

  ‘Their bloody stretched Mercs are all over the pavements,’ Max had said on several occasions.

  The kestrel was not visible, nor was there anything in the nest that she could see. A heron flew overhead. She had seen one before and Mr P. had told her it would be going to the Serpentine in Hyde Park. She had been to the park once or twice, but only driving through with her father. One day she would like to go there and see the birds and the water and the trees — but especially the Park People.

  She focused on the house once more. The curtains on the basement windows were still closed but those on the ground floor had been opened.

  These windows too were covered by security bars but with her binoculars she could now penetrate the screen. She saw movement behind the bars. She worked the zoom. She could dimly make out two figures. One, with an arm raised, seemed to be beating the other. She watched, riveted. Then the figures disappeared. She watched and watched but nothing more happened.

  She kept the glasses fixed on the house. After some time the front door opened and a dark-skinned man wearing a flowing robe came out. He got into a silver Mercedes and drove away.

  ‘Someone’s been messing about with the garden,’ a voice said.

  She turned and saw Ralph behind her.

  He was in his early thirties, big and fair-skinned with long gingerish hair caught in a pigtail, and designer stubble. He was wearing his summer gear: rust-coloured vest, faded blue jeans and dirty sneakers. He wore a gold chain round his neck and had a dagger tattoed on his right shoulder. Dory didn’t care for him because he always smelled of earth and stale sweat.

  ‘You haven’t been watering, have you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just playing with your dolls?’

  ‘I wasn’t playing,’ she said, witheringly.

  ‘OK. So it was old Pargeter.’ He waited for her to confirm or deny this. ‘Was it?’

  Dory had often heard arguments between the two of them. Mr Pargeter accused Ralph of neglecting the garden, Ralph usually told Mr P. to mind his own business.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  Ralph had a habit of interlocking his fingers and flexing them as he spoke and she could see muscles jump in his upper arms making the dagger move up and down.

  ‘What have you got there? Binoculars? I suppose your father gave them to you. Let’s have a look.’

  She didn’t want him touching them with his earth-smelling hands but there was no way she could refuse.

  ‘Hey, look at Douglas, over at Rosemount. He’s so close I could touch him. That’s a new uniform he’s got on. I bet he thinks he looks a treat.’

  ‘Can I have them back, please.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He looked up at the windows of Rosemount. ‘There’s that black priest. He’s standing on his balcony. And the old Scottish bag. I can see her at her window. These are terrific. And there’s someone… Hey, she’s all right…’

  Dory was following the direction of the binoculars. She saw a woman coming out of the house. She was slender and small and was wearing a yellow-and-orange head scarf and dark glasses. She walked quickly in the direction of Hyde Park.

  ‘Give them to me,’ Dory said.

  ‘Hang on.’

  ‘They’re mine! I want them!’

  ‘OK, take them! Cry-baby!’

  Dory didn’t mind what he called her as long as she got her binoculars. She watched the Princess go along the street and then cross over towards the park. She had never seen her out of doors before.

  Ralph began to pull out flowers and replace them with others he had brought up in plastic trays.

  ‘Mr Pargeter doesn’t like dahlias,’ Dory said. ‘He thinks they’re common.’

  ‘I don’t give a f — damn what that old sod says. It’s not his garden.’

  Dory began to collect her things. Being on the roof with Ralph didn’t appeal to her.

  ‘My mother says you didn’t look at the ficus when you came last time.’

  ‘Oh?’ He straightened up. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

  ‘It’s going yellow.’

  ‘Overwatering probably. When can I come in?’

  ‘She says Monday. Around twelve.’

  ‘Tell her OK.’

  Dory went down to her apartment. It was quiet and cool and dim. The silence was the key. Her mother was working. Max had given her a word processor but Adrienne had found it too complicated and eventually it had ended up in Dory’s room. Her mother went back to the expensive laque fountain pen she had always used.

  She demanded — and got — silence, when she wrote.

  The days tended to run to a pattern. In term-time Dory was picked up by a minibus and taken to her exclusive school. She stayed there until mid-afternoon when the bus brought her home. Trevor would take her out to the bus in the morning and in the afternoon go out on to what her mother had described in one of her novels as ‘London’s lethal pavements’ to bring her back into the safety of the building.

  Adrienne might still be working when she came home, in which case Dory would go to her room or up to the roof and talk to Mr Pargeter.

  Max came three or four times a week, usually in the late afternoons, and Dory looked forward to his visits. They broke the silence.

  ‘Dory? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can come in.’

  She went into her mother’s room. Adrienne wrote at a long bleached-oak table, at which she had often been photographed for the glossy magazines. She wrote neatly and quickly and in the afternoons her secretary, Mrs Eldridge, came to pick up the day’s work and bring back the previous day’s work all typed out.

  The room was grey and cream with a large Brett Whiteley on one wall and a Kelim on the floor.

  ‘Did you see Ralph?’

  ‘He says OK.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Read.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Adrienne turned back to her fountain pen and yellow paper; the meeting was over.

  Dory went to her room, switched on the word processor, put in a disc, and wrote the heading:

  THE PRINCESS OF
THE PAVEMENT PEOPLE

  Chapter one

  Once upon a time there was a princess who lived in a house in London. She came from far Cathay and was full of Eastern promise. She was married to a horrible old man and she hated him very much …

  *

  The Bishop of Zombo, a slender black man of medium height, left the balcony of his apartment in Rosemount and went into his bedroom. He was wearing a purple cope, which he had designed himself, and nothing else. He knelt at his king-sized bed and addressed the figurine of a black Christ which hung on the wall above him.

  ‘Lord, I have to talk to you. Just between the two of us, I’m going to sin again. But if you know everything you know that already. Can’t help it, Lord. So I’m asking you to turn the blind eye.

  ‘You are going to say to me, “Bishop Henry, if you know you’re going to sin then don’t do it, boy.”

  ‘My reply to that, Lord, is the usual one about the spirit being strong and the flesh weak. Correction, Lord, very weak. And after all, you created the flesh, all that lovely flesh: brown flesh, black flesh, and white flesh. Flesh is flesh, Lord. It’s TNT.

  ‘You are going to say, “But that’s what you joined the Church for, my son. To stop that desire, to check it, to hold it in.” ‘Talking of holding things in, Lord…’ The Bishop glanced down and giggled. ‘It’s too late for that.’

  The intercom rang. ‘It’s Douglas, sir, at the front desk. There’s a lady here to see you.’

  Henry Chitambo, Bishop Henry of the Children of the Lord First Reformed Church, heard the disapproval in Douglas’s voice. Douglas would have disapproved of letting in the girls even if there hadn’t been the burglaries. He disapproved of most things. Bishop Henry thought that if the Lord could speak that’s what he might sound like.

  ‘Please send her up, Douglas.’

  Oh, yes, Lord, the flesh surely is weak.

  Chapter Six

  Macrae was drunk. Not very drunk but in Leo’s opinion he had drunk enough — especially if they were going out. And they were. Macrae had said, ‘You like a good curry, don’t you, laddie?’ and Leo had said yes because there wasn’t much point in saying no. And in fact he did.

  ‘We can talk there,’ Macrae said.

  The Pukka Sahib was a ten-minute walk from Macrae’s Battersea house. Leo had been there several times before but mostly in winter. As they strolled through the hot summer evening, with the air smelling of petrol and rubber, he noticed that the houses differed widely. Some had been gentrified, with purple paint and shiny brass on the doors, others looked like they were inhabited by Yobbo Man, their gardens covered in tarmac, their paint blistering and peeling.

  Macrae was dressed in summer clothes, which for him meant putting on a short-sleeved shirt and not tucking it into his trousers. Leo thought it wasn’t precisely the designer gear you might have seen in St Tropez. He walked with big strides, his head falling slightly forward. He did not speak, but was lost in his own impenetrable world.

  Leo, on the other hand, was dressed in chinos, a white silk shirt which Zoe had bought for his birthday and dark blue boat shoes. As he’d left the flat in Pimlico he’d caught sight of himself — no, that was perjury — he had gone and stood in front of the long mirror in the bedroom and said, ‘Not bad, Silver, you gorgeous creature.’

  He would have to remember to tell Zoe what she had missed.

  He wondered if Macrae ever dressed up just for the sake of looking good. On mature reflection he thought not. Indeed he wondered whether the big man was even conscious of the need to buy new clothes.

  His wives had probably forced him into Marks and Spencer once in a while. Now Frenchy would be in charge; that’s if she had the time.

  Leo’s thoughts dwelt briefly and lewdly on Frenchy. How the hell, he wondered, did some middle-aged detective like Macrae attract someone like Frenchy? It wasn’t his youth. It wasn’t his looks. It wasn’t the way he lived or dressed. It wasn’t his sweet nature — that was for sure. He wondered if he was paying her, then dismissed the thought. Macrae was skint.

  ‘There’s a newsagent’s,’ Macrae said. ‘I need some cigars.’

  Leo waited on the pavement outside. When he had first joined Macrae at Cannon Street, it was he, Leo, who always had to make sure there was a packet of cigars in the car. Those were the days when Eddie Twyford had been their driver. Poor old Eddie. Dead and gone now.

  The cigar business was over too. Maybe it was an accolade for passing some milestone in their association. If it was Leo didn’t know when it had happened. One day Macrae had got out of the car and bought his own cigars and that had been that.

  They crossed the road to the restaurant.

  ‘Evenin’, Mr Macrae.’

  ‘Hello, Ganesh.’

  ‘How is Mr Macrae?’

  ‘Hungry.’

  Ganesh, small and plump with a black moustache and black shiny eyes, looked around the room. Leo noticed that apart from two tables with reserved notices on them, the place was packed. Several couples were waiting.

  ‘I have a nice table for you,’ Ganesh said, whipping off a reserved notice.

  ‘I’ve got to have a pee,’ Marcrae said in a voice loud enough for several tables to hear. Then to Leo, ‘You order the drinks. I’ll have a Tennant’s and a dram. Is the lager cold?’

  ‘Just the way you like it, Mr Macrae,’ Ganesh said.

  Macrae went off towards the rear of the restaurant.

  Leo felt himself sweating slightly. He wished he was home with Zoe, but she wouldn’t be back till late. She had gone down to visit her father and she and Leo had had an argument about whether he would go with her or not.

  ‘I’ve got enough problems with my own family,’ he had said. ‘For better or for worse, old buddy.’

  It had been Freudian, Leo thought. Must have been. Anyway the phrase had dropped into the space between them like a hand grenade.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say: ‘We’re not married, remember?’ But thank God he hadn’t. Zoe had quickly looked away, and he had pretended not to register.

  They were going through a period when he sensed she wanted to make things more permanent. Just at the moment he didn’t. Some months earlier he had hinted that marriage might not be a bad idea, a hint that was not taken up by Zoe. One day they’d have to get their act together and both want it at the same time. Macrae came back and Ganesh hovered with the menus.

  ‘What have you got?’ Macrae said.

  ‘We got a lovely kofta tonight.’

  ‘OK, laddie?’

  ‘Fine with me, guv’nor.’

  ‘Two koftas, then.’

  ‘Pilau rice?’

  ‘And all the trimmings. You know what’s what. And don’t forget the chilli sauce.’

  Just then a group of four — two couples in their thirties — came into the restaurant. Leo was aware of an argument.

  Ganesh blocked the aisle.

  ‘When?’ he was saying. ‘When are you booking?’

  ‘Couple of hours ago,’ one of the men said.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Smith.’

  ‘How you spell that?’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ the man said, but spelt it anyway.

  Ganesh had the diary in his hand. ‘Not here,’ he said triumphantly. ‘You are booking in other Indian restaurant.’

  The four left, disgruntled. It was obvious to Leo that Macrae had been given their table.

  Ganesh brought the drinks. ‘Some people are not co-operating,’

  he said. ‘Everyone must book on a Saturday night.’

  ‘Aye,’ Macrae said, taking a long pull at the Tennant’s. ‘You’ve a point there, Ganesh.’

  They ate their meal. Macrae ladled chilli sauce on to his rice and soon his shirt began to stick to his chest. Sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down his cheeks.

  When they had finished he lit a cigar and asked Ganesh for a large piece of paper. ‘In the pictures they’re always drawing on the bloody tablec
loths. Never seen it in real life. Right.’ He drew a series of streets. ‘Bayswater. Here’s the Edgeware Road… the Bayswater Road… Sussex Gardens… OK? This is the area. Right here. Near Connaught Street. Little squares, mews, that sort of thing. As upmarket as you can get.’

  ‘It’s what they call the Arab quarter, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye. But it’s not all Arabs. A lot of diplomats too. A lot of foreigners. But also a lot of well-heeled Brits. Always a place for burglaries. But these have been a bit out of the ordinary. Big stuff. And in places, according to Mr Wilson, where they shouldn’t be.’

  Macrae briefed Leo for several minutes then Leo said, ‘Have you got the papers, guv’nor?’

  Macrae nodded. Then he said, ‘A lot of interviews, bloody little in the way of leads.’

  ‘The clear-up rate for breakings is never very high. I mean —’ ‘That’s because burglary is low priority these days. But this is a wealthy area. High profile. That’s the story anyway. Christ, I never thought…’ He shook his head slowly. ‘The Burglary Squad. Not quite the same ring to it as the Flying Squad, is there?’

  ‘Why us?’ Leo put the question he had wanted to put since he had first heard what their new role was to be.

  Macrae thought for a moment and then said, ‘Mr Wilson says it’s because we’re the best. Or at least he says Mr Kenneth Scales, the Deputy Commander, says we’re the best. And he wants the best on the job.’ He finished his whisky. ‘And if you believe that, laddie, you’ll believe anything.’

  They walked back to Macrae’s house.

  ‘How many men are they putting on, guv’nor?’

  ‘Tvo. You and me. I said they could stick it otherwise. I don’t want half the Force tramping about and covering tracks. It’s bad enough as it is.’

  They reached the house. This was the time to split, Leo thought. Don’t go inside.

  ‘I think I’ll be getting back if it’s OK with you, guv’nor. Zoe should be in by now.’

  Macrae did not respond. It was as though he had not heard. He opened the door and motioned Leo in.

  The sitting-room looked a mess but Macrae seemed impervious to that too. ‘Glenmorangie,’ he said, pouring two large measures of Highland malt into whisky glasses.