Threats and Menaces

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘Are you ill, Trevor?’ Mrs Tulley said.

  ‘Course I’m not ill.’

  ‘You’ve been lying there for hours.’

  ‘I feel like lying here.’

  ‘But what about work?’

  ‘What about it?’

  She was baffled. He was lying on his bed in his underpants the way he used to when he was a teenager.

  ‘And knock, next time,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve seen men in their underpants before.’ She tried to make a joke of it. ‘Would you like some soup?’

  ‘In this heat? You want to kill me?’

  ‘What a thing to say!’

  Had he been drinking, she wondered. She couldn’t smell anything but that didn’t always signify. Her ex-husband, the corporal, used to drink vodka. It didn’t taint the breath. Trevor drank, she knew that. But not, surely, in the afternoons. But his face was flushed and his speech slightly thickened. Perhaps it was the heat.

  ‘Are you just going to lie there all day? I’ve got Mrs Smethwick coming in for a perm.’

  ‘It’s none of your business what I do.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it is. We’re mother and son. We’re dependent.’ ‘What’ve you been watching? Some of those old B-movies?’ ‘That’s cruel.’

  ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’

  ‘Trevor, don’t say things like that.’

  He could hear the lump forming in her throat.

  ‘You haven’t gone and lost your job, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t lost my job.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that.’

  He swung his legs off the bed and looked at his watch.

  ‘I’m meeting someone,’ he said.

  She smiled coyly. ‘May I know who that someone is? A young lady?’

  ‘Do me a favour. Anyway… listen… I’m going to get dressed.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Out.’

  She heard him lock the door behind her. Why? She was his mother. Anyway he had his underpants on.

  As dusk crept over the city, she watched him walking across the road in the direction of Selbourne Square.

  She sat at the window for some time. He was getting more and more irritable as the years passed, she thought. He should have married. But what would have happened to her if he had? Her life now would be bleak and lonely. On the other hand she might have been living with him and his wife and her little grandson. She always thought of a grandson not a granddaughter. A tiny Trevor again.

  The happiest time of her life had been when Trevor was a baby. Wheeling him about in his pram. So proud of being a mum. Where had it all gone?

  The thing was, Trevor had never been very interested in girls. He’d been more someone for friendships. Companions. Chums.

  There was a kind of simplicity, an innocence, about the word ‘chum’. A different age, she thought. And yet it wasn’t so long ago. She remembered the books she had read him as a child. The Enid Blyton stories. Just William.

  But sometimes, in her darker moments, she had wondered why he never brought girls home.

  ‘Are you ashamed of them? she had asked him once when he was eighteen. He had laughed in her face.

  That and the drinking. He had started drinking when he was sixteen. He thought she didn’t know, but she did.

  He had spells of drinking. The last bad one had been a few months before, about the time Duggie stopped coming round. He hadn’t really been the same since that time. She got up and went to his room. The door was locked. Why? He knew she had to be in and out of his room to do the housework and put away his clothes. He never locked his door. Why now?

  She went into her bedroom and searched for the key box. This was a small painted wooden box the corporal had given her for a present one Christmas before vanishing for good. It contained every key she had ever had. There were keys for suitcases and padlocks long since thrown out. There were even keys from previous houses and flats. She looked through the keys and finally found a duplicate for Trevor’s door.

  She knew what she was looking for. Bottles. She had once found a bottle hidden in a pot plant; another time under the mattress of his bed. She began to search. None in the drawers, none in the wardrobe.

  It was a tall, heavy wardrobe with a hollow top for storing things like suitcases. She couldn’t tell whether there was anything up there or not.

  She stood on the bed but she still couldn’t see. She went into the kitchen and brought in a chair and stood on it. She couldn’t see but she could feel.

  The first thing she felt was a bottle. She drew it out. It was half full of vodka.

  ‘I thought so,’ she muttered.

  She felt again. This time she brought out a yellow paper wallet of photographs. She also brought out an envelope. She looked at it with a frown. Why, she wondered, was it addressed to her?

  *

  The house was in Barnes; reasonably upmarket, near the river. It was detached and there was a large greenhouse in the garden. It was one of a score of small double-storied villas built in the 1920s which was worth more now than all twenty put together when they were erected.

  Macrae and Silver — who was carrying the search warrant — went up the path to the front door and pressed the bell. There was a sound of chimes. Macrae hated chimes. They paused, rang again, waited, then went round to the back. Silver looked into the greenhouse but the plants were not pansies and were therefore unfamiliar to him.

  Macrae was cupping his eyes with his hands as he peered through the kitchen window.

  ‘Bosch cooker,’ he said. ‘Expensive.’

  Leo walked across to the garage and looked in through the glass windows at the top of the door.

  ‘So’s the car. Five-series BMW. Last year’s model.’

  He rejoined Macrae and they stared at the house. ‘Want me to try a window, guv’nor?’

  “If we break in he’s got us cold. He could accuse us of nicking something. Anything. No, we —’

  ‘What are you doing there?’ said a woman’s rich voice. ‘If you’re not gone in ten seconds I’ll call the police.’

  Leo saw a forty-plus woman with blonded hair and a tan that would have appalled a dermatologist. She was standing on the far side of the garden fence. Behind her on a lawn was a rug and garden furniture.

  ‘We are the police,’ he said.

  She laughed. It was a rich, gravelly sound, and spoke of whisky and late nights and bedrooms. ‘That’s what all the boys say.’ Macrae produced his warrant card and she said, ‘Well, well…’ ‘Do you know Mr Eames?’

  ‘Just to nod to. What’s he done? Robbed the plant house at Kew?’

  ‘Maybe. Are you his neighbour?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Would you come over here for a moment?’

  ‘Like this?’ She indicated her minute bikini out of which she was bulging in a not unattractive way.

  ‘Just think of us as doctors,’ Leo said.

  ‘Naughty.’

  She put on a shorty gown and joined them. ‘I don’t know if I should be here,’ she said. ‘Ferdie doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Who’s Ferdie?’ Macrae said.

  ‘My gentleman caller. He told me never to speak to strange men.’ Everything she said seemed to amuse her.

  ‘Just tell him you’re helping the police in their enquiries,’ Leo said, trotting out the well-worn phrase.

  ‘OK. How do I help?’

  ‘See that window?’ Macrae said, and smashed a pane with half a brick.

  ‘Now that really is naughty.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Leo said.

  ‘Mrs Blake. Rose Blake.’

  ‘OK, Mrs Blake, see this? It’s a search warrant, sworn out by a magistrate earlier today. It allows us to search the premises whether Mr Eames likes it or not. Only he isn’t here to let us in. So we want you to be with us while we’re inside in case Mr Eames says we pinched the silver while we were doing our search.’

  ‘And I’m there to say yo
u didn’t, is that it? This is more fun than I’ve had all year.’

  Leo climbed through the window and unlocked the kitchen door from the inside.

  ‘Nice.’ She was examining the stove. ‘Everything’s brand new. And expensive.’

  ‘How expensive?’ Macrae said.

  ‘Harrods.’

  They went into the sitting-room. It was warm and still. Everything here, too, was new, including the TV and the stereo.

  ‘It all looks like it came out of an expensive catalogue,’ she said. ‘D’you mind telling me what he’s supposed to have done?’

  ‘It’s just a routine enquiry,’ Macrae said.

  ‘Oh, I love that. You’re telling —’

  ‘Guv’nor!’

  Leo had moved into a small side room in which there was a modern matt black dining-table and six chairs.

  Macrae joined him. ‘What?’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Partridge,’ Leo said.

  In the centre of the table stood a large silver bird. ‘Old man Pargeter. He said he had one of these. Used to greet it every time he saw it. You remember, guv’nor?’

  ‘Aye, I do.’

  Rose said, ‘Is this a new sort of game? Can anyone play?’ They ignored her.

  ‘He must have flogged everything else,’ Leo said. ‘Why not this one?’

  ‘Because he liked it.’ Macrae circled the table examining it.

  ‘Happens quite often. The villains know they shouldn’t but they think: just this piece; just this once.’

  ‘You mean you think he stole that?’ Rose said.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Macrae said. ‘It’s possible he stole a great many things.’

  Macrae found a plastic bag and, lifting the silver partridge with the tips of his fingers so as not to wipe off any prints, he placed it in the bag.

  ‘We’re taking this,’ Macrae said. ‘You’re the witness.’

  As he locked the back door she said, ‘You can’t just leave the house like this, not with a broken window.’

  ‘We’ll have a uniformed officer keep an eye on it.’

  Macrae turned to her as they reached the car. ‘Did you ever see Mr Eames unloading things late at night and bringing them into the house?’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do late at night. But I did sometimes see him bring young men home.’

  ‘How young?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mean that young. Students. That sort of age. But there was one thing…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way he dressed. Ferdie remarked on it too. When he was leaving in the morning he looked like a tramp. Dirty old clothes. But when he went out in the evening he was sharp, if you know what I mean. All gold chains and black shirts and white shoes. And leather.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t go gardening in that sort of gear, would he?’ Macrae said.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  They got into the car. ‘Where to, guv’nor?’

  ‘Pargeter. I want him to identify this. Then we find Ralph bloody Eames.’

  Dory was afraid.

  She sat in her room surrounded by her technological toys and although she could not have put it into words she sensed, as a little girl might sense, that something had changed in her life. Irrevocably.

  And that was what was making her afraid.

  It had to do with her father.

  Life with her mother was a series of advances and retreats on both sides; a kind of emotional trench warfare. But nothing like that had ever occurred with her father.

  She had left the room after her mother’s outburst and gone to her bedroom and sat there listening to the low hum of their voices.

  She went back over their conversation but it wasn’t so much the conversation itself that bothered her as the little bits of body language and the facial expressions which had gone with it.

  She knew that deep down she had disappointed her father and that had never happened before.

  It had shaken her. What had made things worse was that when she did leave the room her parents seemed to switch away from her with an ease that was upsetting.

  Max had stayed for more than an hour and she had crept back several times to listen. Her name was not mentioned once. It was all to do with her mother’s work.

  And then her father had called, ‘Dory! I’m going now.’ Not ‘darling’ or ‘sugar’ or any of the many endearments she was used to.

  Just Dory.

  But she had skipped to the door, playing her seven-year-old role, and waited for him to pick her up and give her the usual hug. Instead he kissed her absently on the forehead and she said, ‘Goodbye, Max.’

  And he said, ‘I don’t think you should call me that any more.’

  Since then she had sat staring at the screen of the word processor trying to analyse as best she could the reasons for what had happened.

  They crystallized in Alice.

  Not Alisha. Not the princess full of Eastern Promise. Just Alice.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was early evening and traffic was heavy on the Westway. Macrae was in Leo’s passenger seat and his face was beginning to match the heavy evening clouds.

  ‘Look at them!’ he said, indicating the jammed cars. ‘Bloody idiots. Why don’t they catch the train?’

  Coming from Macrae, Leo thought, that was rich.

  ‘Good place for an assassination,’ Leo said. ‘If you knew that the target used this road every day you could blow him away before anyone could get their doors open.

  ‘Target! Blow him away! That’s Captain Marvel again.’ Macrae was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Listen, if the little girl whatshemame —’

  ‘Dory.’

  ‘Aye, Dory. If she’s right then what part does the maid have? And why was she bleeding? And why wasn’t she spotted if she was bleeding badly? We’ll check every bloody hospital in London and — ’

  The car phone rang. It was Macrae’s immediate superior, DCS Wilson.

  ‘Yes, Les.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the Westway.’

  ‘Good. We’ve just had a call from the local police in Paddington about a Mrs Tulley. Says she’s the mother of the porter at those flats — ’

  ‘Selbourne Place. Where a couple of the breakings occurred. What’s it all about?’

  ‘Apparently she’s found a suicide note written by her son, Trevor Tulley. That’s the one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, that’s the one. Have they found a body?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Les, we’ve got something that can’t wait.’ He told him about the silver bird and old man Pargeter. ‘If it’s his it’ll prove Eames was nicking stuff.’

  ‘But not that he was implicated in the murder, George. And we’ve had the little girl’s mother on the phone. She says she’s been thinking it over and thought we better know that Dory makes up stories.’

  Aye, she said so at the time.’

  ‘George, the shit’s hitting the fan what with the Foreign Office and the MOD muscling in on the arms business. And all we’ve got is a seven-year-old child whose own mother says she’s a liar. The Tulley thing may be important and anyway — ’

  ‘You know as well as I do that people who leave suicide notes around for other people to find never do it.’

  ‘What I was about to say was that Mrs Tulley lives on your route. Just off Praed Street. The Cutforth Estate round the back of the station. Number forty-three. Look in, see what the form is. Then go on to Pargeter. Won’t take a moment.’

  Macrae put the phone down. ‘Take the Paddington exit,’ he said.

  The Cutforth Estate was small by London standards. One large building that dated from the early fifties; red brick, sooty, tired trees, tarmac, not much graffiti, not much anything.

  ‘Old people,’ Macrae said, looking at the net curtains in the windows. ‘You can always tell.’

  A woman police constable was with Mrs Tulley. She met Macrae and Silver at the door. ‘A doctor’s been, sir
, and given her a sedative.’

  ‘Has her son been found?’

  ‘Not that I know of, sir.’

  The two detectives went into the small sitting/dining-room. It could have been a film set for those black-and-white movies Leo had been talking about earlier. The furniture was mid-fifties, the easy chairs, the table and the sideboard all had thin screw-in legs tipped with fake brass.

  Mrs Tulley was sprawled slackly in an armchair. Her hair was awry, her face flushed, and her skirt was above her blue-veined knees.

  Macrae introduced them but she hardly registered.

  ‘Where’s Trevor?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Tulley. But we’ll find him. In my experience people who leave notes around don’t do violence to themselves. It’s a cry for help more than anything else. May I see it?’

  ‘He didn’t “leave it around”.’

  ‘I was told —’

  ‘He made me look for it!’

  ‘I don’t —’

  She leaned forward, her old cheeks shaking. ‘That’s why he locked the door. He knew I’d have to open it. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Anyone would. You can’t have locked doors in a flat this size. Stands to reason. And he knew I would. That was his game.’

  ‘Game?’ Leo said.

  ‘Humiliation. Can’t stand it himself so he does it to others. He wanted to humiliate me. He wanted to make me find the spare key to his room — otherwise why didn’t he take it? — and he wanted me to carry in a chair. He knew, you see,’cause I’d done it before. I mean the bottle was where you’d expect it. I’d found one there another time. He knew what to do.’

  Macrae let her ramble on.

  ‘He’d put it on top of his wardrobe. And that was where the letter was. And the pictures.’

  ‘What pictures?’

  ‘He wanted me to see those too. Me! His own mother. Once I found him kissing a man. And you know what he said? He said they were going to act in a play. That they were rehearsing their parts. And I thought that’s nice. They’re chums. They’re doing things together like chums do.’

  ‘Chums?’ Macrae repeated the word as though it was Old Lappish.

  ‘He had lots of chums.’

  ‘Can I see the pictures?’ Macrae said.

  ‘No, you can not see them. I burnt them. No one will ever see them! You know what I used to call him?’ A lump formed in her throat. ‘My little soldier. God help me. And he does that to his own mother.’