‘Thank you, Bilson, I think we will.’ He turned to Betty Stanway. ‘What would you like, Miss Stanway?’
‘Oh, Betty, please,’ she gasped. ‘A dry martini, please. Everyone calls me Betty.’
‘Three dry martinis, please, Bilson.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They sat in comfortable leather armchairs. Paul hoped he wouldn’t become too comfortable and fall asleep. It had been a full day, and the mood of the Coach House was calculatedly euphoric.
‘Talk to me, Betty,’ he said. ‘Tell me all your worries.’
As Betty took her drink from the bartender the slightly red light turned her eyes into a dramatic violet colour. ‘I read all those articles you wrote about the recent bank robberies and the way crime has changed. Like you were saying tonight. You said that the people who actually committed the robberies were not the people –’
Paul nodded his encouragement. ‘Not necessarily the people who organised them. That was what I said in the paper, and after this Harkdale affair I’m more than ever convinced that I’m right. Because most of the people who committed that robbery are dead, and the money is still missing.’
‘I know.’ She put her glass down in a sudden, unladylike gesture. ‘I know something about what happened at Harkdale. Not much. It isn’t enough to go to the police with, and I’m not the kind who goes to the police in any case. But I think I heard the robbery being planned.’
‘Go on, Betty.’ He wasn’t tired any more. ‘Start at the beginning.’
‘Well, for the last six months I’ve been working at a club called The Love-Inn. That’s where The Melody Girls were formed. I don’t suppose you would know it –’
‘It’s in Soho; owned by a woman called Rita Fletcher.’
‘That’s right. You are well informed. Although actually it’s run by Rita for the man who really owns it. He’s an American, a horrible little dipso. Rita runs it for him. But anyway, one night, about three months ago, Rita introduced me to a man called Desmond Blane –’
Chapter Three
One night about three months ago Rita Fletcher had introduced her to a man called Desmond Blane. He was a wealthy man, or he lived like one, which amounted to the same thing. Betty had already noticed him in the club several times and she encouraged his friendship. Betty Stanway wasn’t hoping to be a dancer all her life.
Desmond Blane was in his early thirties, a powerfully built dark haired man. He lived in Knightsbridge, which seemed to Betty the height of aristocratic living. He called it a penthouse and it overlooked the park. Betty was too impressed to ask what he did for a living. She assumed it was something in the City.
The third time she spent the night at his penthouse she developed doubts about the City. They had gone to bed rather late even for her, she was exhausted and high on vodka. She scarcely remembered going to bed, and when she woke up it was daylight and Desmond was not beside her.
She lay there for a few minutes trying to piece together what had happened the night before. She was afraid she might have fallen asleep while they were making love. Betty wasn’t terribly good at the fast life. She needed a cup of coffee.
When Desmond appeared in his silk dressing gown and matching silk scarf, looking like a bachelor from a more serious 1920s musical, he was reading the morning’s mail.
‘Good morning,’ she murmured with an anxious smile.
‘Oh, you’re awake.’ He confirmed her worst imaginings; instead of reassuring her Desmond ripped open a letter with obvious displeasure.
‘I’d love some coffee.’
‘I made some,’ he said absent mindedly. ‘It’s in the kitchen.’
When Betty returned with a cup of coffee Desmond was still sitting on the foot of the bed with the letter in his hand.
‘What’s the matter, Des?’ she asked. ‘Bad news?’
‘No, it’s nothing.’ He put the letter in his dressing gown pocket. ‘Just business. Isn’t it time you put some clothes on?’
‘I’m sorry, Des.’ Something told her it was all spoiled. Last night they had talked of going away for the weekend. It was her first long weekend free in ages, and they were going to spend it together. But that had been last night. Betty picked up her clothes and went into the dressing room. Now it was morning.
She was twenty-eight, and she was beginning to dread the mornings. She was too often hung over, and every morning the crow’s feet looked more noticeable around her eyes. She touched her toes twelve times, splashed cold water on her breasts and breathed deeply by the open window. It would be nice to be young again, or middle aged and past all this. It would be nice to be a shorthand typist.
She was massaging her neck with cream when she realised that Desmond was talking in the bedroom. Her natural curiosity triumphed over discretion.
‘I’m not happy about it,’ he was saying. ‘You know damned well why. In my opinion we’re pushing fate.’
Betty crouched and peered through the keyhole but she could only see his feet tapping in agitation on the floor. His large blue slippers looked absurdly like separate beings, dancing together, nothing to do with the man.
‘Have you spoken to Renson? And what about Skibby? What does he think?’ There was a pause. ‘He would, the greedy bastard. But I still think the twenty-third is too soon after the other jobs. And why Harkdale? I don’t even know where Harkdale is!’
Betty went through into the bedroom. Desmond Blane didn’t even look up at her.
‘All right, we’ll talk about it tonight. Yes, yes, we’ll discuss it. I’ll see you about eight o’clock.’
Betty went across to him and put her arms round his neck from behind. ‘Who was that,’ she asked with a laboured attempt at humour, ‘another one of your girlfriends?’
‘Mm?’ He suddenly smiled at her. He was back. ‘Yes, an impatient Spanish bird. I call her my flaming flamingo.’ He kissed her neck. ‘But she can’t dance the way you dance, Elizabeth, and she lacks your stamina.’
Betty laughed delightedly. ‘Do you really love me, Des? You said last night – Well, you said we could go away together for the weekend.’
‘We’ll have the wildest weekend of your life,’ he said deliberately. ‘Be here on Friday morning at ten o’clock sharp, and bring your passport. It will be a weekend to remember.’
Friday mornings in Knightsbridge are pretty crowded and the taxi pulled up outside the block of service flats at four minutes past ten. Betty emerged from the taxi in her smart little powder lemon suit and carrying her weekend case. She paid off the taxi and hurried into the entrance. Desmond Blane’s flat was on the fifth floor and she waited for the lift.
‘Good morning, miss,’ said the porter. ‘Going up?’
‘Fifth floor, please. It’s a beautiful morning. It’s going to be a beautiful weekend.’
‘Yes, miss.’ The old boy slammed the gates and they shot up in a vertical take-off. He clearly enjoyed his work. ‘If you’re wanting Mr Blane I don’t think he’s in.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Betty, ‘he’s expecting me.’ She had received a note from Desmond the day before, urging her to be on time and reminding her to bring her passport.
‘Fifth floor,’ he announced defiantly. ‘But Mr Blane isn’t in.’
Betty went along the corridor to the front door of Desmond’s flat and rang the bell. She rang again almost immediately. The elderly porter had remained with the lift and he was watching with satisfaction. She banged on the door with her fist.
‘He hasn’t been here since Monday night!’ the porter bawled.
Betty walked slowly back to the lift.
‘And he’s not coming back neither,’ the old boy added, ‘not never.’
‘Are you sure?’ She went into the lift; the clang of the gates and then the plunge to the ground seemed absurdly symbolic to her. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘No, miss. The head porter, he had a note from the agents this morning. We got the keys back, and there’s talk of another tenant moving in on Monda
y. There isn’t no mistake.’
‘But his clothes – the furniture – I mean, did he move out?’
The old man shrugged. ‘These flats are all let furnished. I suppose he just took his clothes and personal belongings.’ He watched her leave the lift and walk unhappily back to the street and his satisfaction waned. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ he said finally. ‘It came as a bit of a surprise to us as well. He’d been here three years. It was a bit sudden.’
‘Never mind,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve been stood up before.’ She tried to smile. ‘I suppose you’re working this weekend?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ He grinned. ‘But you’ll have a beautiful weekend.’
During the next three weeks Betty Stanway forgot Desmond Blane. She was a resilient girl and men still noticed her. The shoulder length auburn hair and the lithe dancer’s body attracted enough admiration to make the evenings fun. And then all the girls were going to appear on television, which meant extra rehearsals and a lot of hard work. They had been on television several times in the past five years, but Betty still experienced a naive feeling of excitement: maybe this would be her breakthrough, the girls featured on a regular show each week, eventual main billing, stardom. At one o’clock in the morning the fantasy would take hold, and it did no harm. She even began to feel fit, almost human, when she woke up. Until the morning when she saw a report in the newspaper about a robbery in Harkdale.
Then she remembered the telephone call which Desmond had been making that morning before he disappeared. He hadn’t even known where Harkdale was! Betty glanced at the date on the newspaper. It was the twenty-fourth, and the robbery had been on the twenty-third. She read through the report again. It just couldn’t be coincidence.
While she was dressing she turned on the radio. The rehearsal had been called for ten o’clock so she had no time to worry about ex-boyfriends. She put Harkdale out of her mind until the news came on.
‘Another of the men whom the police wished to question in relation to the bank robbery yesterday afternoon at Harkdale has died, it was reported early this morning. The man was forty-three-year-old Oscar Thorne –’
Betty went to work in a trance. She caught the tube at Belsize Park as usual, accepted a seat with a smile from an elderly business man, and sat staring at the black pipes in the tunnel. She wondered whether to go to the police, but she had nothing to tell them except a name, and that might seem like malice against the man who had jilted her. She lit a cigarette and read unseeingly through the rest of the newspaper. Protest demonstrations, war in Asia, a couple of sexual assaults, politicians denouncing racialism. Nothing to capture the attention. Her mind wandered on to an article about the new brains behind organised crime.
‘What Rothschild did to banking and Woolworth did to shopkeeping Al Capone did to crime, but Al Capone was not a brilliant man. Today the rewards of crime are comparable to those of other big business careers, and a brilliant tycoon might waver before deciding to become a property developer. And at least three tycoons have decided otherwise –’
Betty read with total absorption and almost forgot to change trains at Tottenham Court Road. She knew that Desmond wasn’t a tycoon of crime, because he had been protesting against the instructions he had received from someone. But she was pleased to have it confirmed that he was a business man. The article went on to question the effectiveness of a police force drawn from a basically underprivileged section of society, who could no more cope with modern crime than they could cope with irregularities in high finance.
The author was Paul Temple. In the last few lines of his article he mentioned the Harkdale robbery as proof of his argument. The series of articles had obviously been written well in advance, and the reference to Harkdale would have been a last minute insertion. Betty was impressed, especially when she arrived at the television studios and found that Paul Temple was to be a star guest in the Brian Clay Show that evening. She determined to tell him what had happened.
It would be easier to talk to a stranger than to someone she knew, even someone as close as Rita Fletcher. Rita came to the rehearsal for about an hour in the afternoon, and she sensed that something was wrong. But Betty couldn’t talk to her.
‘I’m depressed, I suppose,’ said Betty. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’
‘You girls are always down about something. Are these men worth it? I wish they didn’t exist!’ Rita was an extrovert woman in her mid-forties, and clearly men never gave her any trouble. She was bosomy and corsetted and her men did as she told them. ‘You need a rest. You ought to go home to mother for the weekend. On Monday you’ll be a new girl.’
‘It’s all right, Rita –’
‘Go home. Mr Coley won’t miss you for two days.’
Betty nodded gratefully. She hadn’t been home since Christmas. Maybe she could leave her problems behind in London. ‘I’ll telephone my mother during the break.’
She almost went home without talking to Paul Temple. He was a debonair type, smoothly relaxed with all the terrifying television people. As the evening wore on Betty’s resolution began to fail. She tried to speak to him twice, but he was always surrounded by producers and people like that. He had an amused manner which helped to make some politician Betty had never heard of look ridiculous. Even though Paul Temple smiled at her rather sweetly the things she had to say about Harkdale seemed too trivial, and she didn’t want to look a fool.
Then as she was leaving the studios she had seen him being driven away by a woman who didn’t look much older than herself. Betty had swung round in indecision and fallen across her suitcase. That was how she came to tell Paul Temple her troubles. [They gave her a lift to Oxford. She told her story over a succulent steak at the Coach House.]
‘Desmond seems to have completely disappeared,’ she concluded. ‘When I read about the robbery in Harkdale, and the man who was killed, the man they called Skibby, I realised what had happened.’
Paul Temple nodded in encouragement. ‘Tell me, Betty, did you ever meet any of Blane’s friends? Renson, or the man called Skibby, for instance?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’d never heard of them before that phone call.’
His wife, Steve, looked disappointed. ‘But surely you must have met some of his friends?’
‘I know it’s peculiar now that you mention it, but I didn’t. We went out quite a lot, but always it was only the two of us.’ She finished the steak, and felt contentedly full. The club itself impressed her. ‘Actually Rita came with us on one occasion. It was a Sunday and the three of us drove out to Maidenhead for lunch.’
‘When Desmond came to the club, to the Love-Inn, was he always alone?’ Steve asked.
‘Yes, always. Except on New Year’s Eve.’ Betty suddenly remembered the occasion, it was almost the first time she had met Desmond Blane. Most of the members had been drunk and Cynthia Elphinstone had nearly been sacked for doing a strip tease to Auld Lang Syne. ‘He had another man with him that night, a man called Arnold something or other. I didn’t like him very much. He stared at us girls.’
‘What did he look like?’ Paul Temple asked.
Betty closed her eyes in an effort to remember. She wasn’t very good at describing people. ‘He was about sixty, I suppose. Almost as tall as me, and he smiled the whole time. Perhaps he was just good natured. Oh yes, and he had a northern accent.’
When they dropped her off at the end of her road it was gone half past one and Betty Stanway was worried again. Not as worried as she had been, because Paul Temple had promised her there would be no unpleasantness, no publicity. He had a friend at Scotland Yard called Charlie Vosper who was a very nice man, and Charlie Vosper would come and see her on Monday when she was back in London. But it didn’t seem right.
‘I know you’ll probably think I’m crazy,’ she had said as she got out of the car. ‘But in spite of what’s happened, with Des walking out on me, I’m still very fond of him.’
Paul Temple’s smile was warmly reassuring, and then the Ro
lls drove on. She watched it out of sight before walking the last fifty yards to the house where she had spent her childhood. The semi-detached houses were all in darkness and they all looked strangely the same to her now. She deliberately tried to feel her way back to the girl who had known every kid in the street, who had belonged among these gardens and homes and the footpaths at the back, a securely happy and slightly reckless Betty Stanway.
There was somebody standing by her front gate. She could only see the shadow in the dark until she was close to him, and then she stopped in amazement.
‘Why,’ she said, and her voice sounded more frightened than amazed, ‘Des!’
Chapter Four
They were across the borders into Worcestershire and even in the dark Paul could feel the difference in the countryside, sense the hills and smell the fields. In his more ecstatic moments, such as when they had bought Random Cottage a few years ago, Paul described Broadway literally as the heart of England. Whenever he arrived there for a few days snatched from London life he wanted to give up the metropolis and become a country gentleman. But he usually found that his novels were progressing too slowly in the country. The pace was too slow, and an innate puritanism would drive him back again to the rat race. However, for the next week or so Paul knew he would be totally content.
Going for walks through the wooded hills, a few hours writing in the afternoon, down to the village pub of an evening for a gossip, catching up on his reading. Being with Steve. What more can life afford?
‘Do you think that Desmond whatever-his-name-is could be one of your criminal master minds?’ Steve asked.
‘Eh? No.’ They were driving through the village and Paul switched on the full headlamps to catch the turning into their lane past the war memorial. ‘Darling, there have always been master minds in crime. I said that the new master minds are not the criminal type. They come from the new meritocracy. I know even that is not very original, but it’s less corny than you make it sound. It happens to be true.’
Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery Page 3