Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  Goads his team on to one final effort,

  ‘Make a stand at the ultimate ditch!’

  Hark! the voice of the umpiring master

  Rises over the white-flannelled strife,

  Tells his charges that life is like cricket,

  Tells them also that cricket’s like life . . .

  Don’t think you have that one at Eton, do you, Son?

  I tell you, after two months in that prison, Squiffy Yoxborough knows as much about being at Raspington as the Marquess of Gorsley does himself. He stays on a couple more weeks, to check there’s nothing more, but by now the marquess is just rambling and repeating himself, sinking deeper and deeper into an alcoholic coma. So Squiffy quickly organizes his own thousand quid release money, and scarpers back to England.

  First thing he does when he gets back home, Squiffy forms a company. Well, he doesn’t actually literally form a company, but he, like, gets all the papers forged so it looks like he’s formed a company. He calls this company ‘Only Real Granite House-Building Construction Techniques’ (ORGHBCT) and he gets enough forged paperwork for him to be able to open a bank account in that name.

  Next thing he gets his clothes together. Moves carefully here. Got to get the right gear or the whole thing falls apart.

  Dark blue pinstripe suit. Donegal tweed suit. Beale and Inmans corduroy trousers. Cavalry twills. Turnbull and Asser striped shirts. Viyella Tattersall checked shirts. Church’s Oxford shoes. Barbour jacket. Herbert Johnson trilby.

  He steals or borrows this lot. Can’t just buy them in the shops. Got to look old, you see.

  Has trouble with the Old Raspurian tie. Doesn’t know anyone who went there – except of course for the marquess, and he’s rather a long way away.

  So he has to buy a tie new and distress it a bit. Washes it so’s it shrinks. Rubs in a bit of grease. Looks all right.

  (You may be wondering, Son, how I come to know all this detail. Not my usual special subject, I agree. Don’t worry, all will be revealed.)

  Right, so having got the gear, he packs it all in a battered old leather suitcase, rents a Volvo estate and drives up to Scotland.

  He’s checked out where the Duke of Glammerton’s estate is, he’s checked that the old boy’s actually in residence, and he just drives up to the front of Glammerton House. Leaves the Volvo on the gravel, goes up to the main door and pulls this great ring for the bell.

  Door’s opened by some flunkey.

  ‘Hello,’ says Squiffy, doing the right voice of course. ‘I’m a chum of Alex’s. Just happened to be in the area. Wondered if the old devil was about.’

  ‘Alex?’ says the flunkey, bit suspicious.

  ‘Yes. The Marquess of Gorsley. I was at school with him.’

  ‘Ah. I’m afraid the marquess is abroad.’

  ‘Oh, really? What a swiz,’ says Squiffy. ‘Still, I travel a lot. Whereabouts is the old devil?’

  Flunkey hesitates a bit, then says he’ll go off and try to find out. Comes back with the butler. Butler confirms the marquess is abroad. Cannot be certain where.

  ‘What, hasn’t left a forwarding address? Always was bloody inefficient. Never mind, I’m sure some of my chums could give me a lead. Don’t worry, I’ll track him down.’

  This makes the butler hesitate, too. ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll just go and see if his Grace is available. He might have more information about the marquess’s whereabouts than I have.’

  Few minutes later, Squiffy gets called into this big lounge-type room, you know, all deers’ heads and gilt frames, and there’s the Duke of Glammerton sitting over a tray of tea. Duke sees the tie straight away.

  ‘Good Lord, are you an Old Raspurian?’

  ‘Yes, your Grace,’ says Squiffy.

  ‘Which house?’

  ‘Stuke.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘Well, of course, Duke, I knew you must have been. That’s where I met Alex, you see. Members of the same family in the same house, what?’

  Duke doesn’t look so happy now he knows Squiffy’s a friend of his son. No doubt the old boy’s met a few unsuitable ones in his time, so Squiffy says quickly, ‘Haven’t seen Alex for yonks. Virtually since school.’

  ‘Oh.’ Duke looks relieved. ‘As Moulton said, I’m afraid he’s abroad.’

  ‘Living there?’

  ‘Yes. For the time being,’ duke says carefully.

  ‘Oh dear. You don’t by any chance have an address, do you?’

  ‘Erm . . . Not at the moment, no.’

  Now all this is suiting Squiffy very nicely. The more the duke’s determined to keep quiet about his son’s real circumstances, the better.

  ‘That’s a nuisance,’ says Squiffy. ‘Wanted to sting the old devil for a bit of money.’

  ‘Oh?’ Duke looks careful again.

  ‘Well, not for me, of course. For the old school.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Duke looks interested.

  ‘Absolutely.’ (Squiffy knows he should say this every now and then instead of ‘Yes’.) ‘For my sins I’ve got involved in some fund-raising for the old place.’

  ‘Again? What are they up to this time?’

  ‘Building a new Great Hall to replace Big Hall.’

  Duke’s shocked by this. ‘They’re not going to knock Big Hall down?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. No, Big Hall’ll still be used. The Great Hall will be for school plays, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Ah. Where are they going to build it?’

  ‘Well, it’ll be at right angles to Big Hall, sort of stretching past Thurrocks out towards “Straggler’s Hump”.’

  ‘Really? Good Lord.’ The old geezer grins. ‘I remember walking along “Straggler’s Hump” many a time.’

  ‘You must’ve been a “whisk” then.’

  He looks guilty. ‘Never was, actually.’

  ‘Doing it illegally, were you?’

  Duke nods.

  ‘But didn’t that mean you got dragged into the “Treacle Tin” for “spluggers”?’

  ‘Never caught.’ Duke giggles naughtily. ‘Remember, actually, I did it my second day as a “tad”.’

  ‘What, directly after you’d been “scrogged”?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And none of the “dommies” saw you?’

  Duke shakes his head, really chuffed at what an old devil he used to be. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘where are you staying up here?’

  ‘I was going to check into the . . . what is it in the village? The Glammerton Arms?’

  ‘Well, don’t do that, old boy. Stay here the night. I’ll get Moulton to show you a room.’

  Gets a good dinner, that night, Squiffy does. Pheasant, venison, vintage wines, all that. Just the two of them. Duchess had died a long time ago.

  Get on really well, they do. Squiffy does his usual getting-plastered act, but, as usual, he’s careful. Talks a lot about Raspington, doesn’t talk too much about the marquess. But listens. And gets confirmation of his hunch that the duke never wants to see his son again. Also knows there’s a very strong chance of this happening in the natural course of events. The amount of rum the marquess is putting away, his liver must be shrivelled down to like a dried pea.

  Anyway, when they’re giving the port and brandy and cigars a bash, the duke, who’s a bit the worse for wear, says, ‘What is all this about the old school? Trying to raise money, did you say?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Squiffy. ‘Don’t just want to raise money, though. Want to raise a monument.’

  ‘What – a monument to all the chaps who died from eating “slops”?’

  ‘Or the chaps who were poisoned in the “Binn”?’

  ‘Or everyone who got “scrogged” in their own “nitbox”!’

  ‘Yes, or all those who had a “down-the-loo-shampoo” in the “fruitbowls”!’

  Duke finds this dead funny. Hasn’t had such a good time for years.

  ‘No, actually,’ says Squiffy, all serious now, ‘we want the n
ew Great Hall to be a monument to a great Old Raspurian.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So that every chap who walks into that hall will think of someone who was really a credit to the old school.’

  ‘Oh. Got anyone in mind?’ asks the duke.

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Squiffy. ‘We thought of Alex.’

  ‘WHAT!’

  ‘Well, he’s such a great chap.’

  ‘Alex – great chap?’

  ‘Yes. As I say, I’ve hardly seen him since school . . . nor have any of the other fellows on the fund-raising committee, actually, but we all thought he was such a terrific chap at school . . . I mean, I’m sure he’s gone on to be just as successful in the outside world.’

  ‘Well . . . er . . .’

  ‘So you see, Duke, we all thought, what a great idea to have the place named after Alex – I mean he’d have to put up most of the money, but that’s a detail – and then everyone who went into the hall would be reminded of what a great Old Raspurian he was. Give the “tads” something to aspire to, what?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The duke gets thoughtful. ‘But are you sure that Alex is the right one?’

  ‘Oh. Well, if there’s any doubt about his suitability, perhaps we should investigate a bit further into what he’s been up to since he left Raspington . . .’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ says the duke, sharpish. ‘What sort of sum of money are we talking about?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Squiffy looks all casual like. ‘I don’t know. Five hundred thousand, something like that.’

  ‘Five hundred thousand to ensure that Alex is always remembered as one of the greatest Old Raspurians . . .?’

  ‘I suppose you could think of it like that. Absolutely.’

  A light comes into the old duke’s eyes. He’s had reports from the West Indies. He knows his son hasn’t got long to go. And suddenly he’s offered a way of . . . like enshrining the marquess’s memory. With a great permanent monument at the old school, a little bit of adverse publicity in the past’ll soon be forgotten. The Family Name will remain untarnished. Half a million’s not much to pay for that.

  He rings a bell and helps them both to some more pre-War port. Moulton comes in.

  ‘My cheque book, please.’

  The butler geezer delivers it and goes off again.

  ‘Who should I make this payable to?’ asks the duke.

  ‘Well, in fact,’ says Squiffy, ‘the full name’s the “Old Raspurian Great Hall Building Charitable Trust”, but you’ll never get all that on the cheque. Just the initials will do.’

  With the cheque safely in his pocket, Squiffy starts humming the tune of the Raspington School Cricket Song.

  ‘Great,’ says the duke. ‘Terrific. I always used to do the solo on the second verse. Do you know the descant?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Squiffy and together they sing,

  See the schoolboy a soldier in khaki,

  Changed his bat for the Gatling and Bren.

  How his officer’s uniform suits him,

  How much better he speaks than his men.

  Thank the school for his noble demeanour,

  And his poise where vulgarity’s rife,

  Knowing always that life is like cricket,

  Not forgetting that cricket’s like life.

  All right, Son. Obvious question is, how do I know all that? How do I know all that detail about Squiffy Yoxborough?

  Answer is, he told me. And he’ll tell me again every blooming night if he gets the chance.

  Yes, he’s inside here with me.

  And why? Why did he get caught? Was it because the duke woke up next morning and immediately realized it was a transparent con? Realized that he’d been pissed the night before and that it really was a bit unusual to give a complete stranger a cheque for half a million quid?

  No, duke’s mind didn’t work like that. So long as he thought he was dealing with a genuine Old Raspurian, he reckoned he’d got a good deal. OK, it’d cost him five hundred grand, but, as a price for covering up everything that his son’d done in the past, it was peanuts. The Family Name would remain untarnished – that was the important thing.

  But, like I just said, that was only going to work so long as he thought he was dealing with a genuine Old Raspurian.

  And something the butler told him the next morning stopped him thinking that he was.

  So, when Squiffy goes to the bank to pay in his cheque to the ‘Only Real Granite House-Building Construction Techniques’ account, he’s asked to wait for a minute, and suddenly the cops are all over the shop.

  So what was it? He got the voice right, he got the clothes right, he got all the Old Raspurian stuff right, he used the right knives and forks at dinner, he said ‘Absolutely’ instead of ‘Yes’ . . . where’d he go wrong?

  I’ll tell you – when he got up the next morning he made his own bed.

  Well, butler sussed him straight away. Poor old Squiffy’d shown up his upbringing. Never occur to the sort of person he was pretending to be to make a bed. There was always servants around to do that for you.

  See, there’s some things you can learn from outside, and some you got to know from inside. And that making the bed thing, it takes generations of treating peasants like dirt to understand that.

  I hope I’ve made my point. Stick at it, Son. Both the work and the social bit. You’re going to get right to the top, like I said. You’re not going to be an old-fashioned villain, you’re going to do it through the system. And if you’re going to succeed, you can’t afford the risk of being let down by the sort of mistake that shopped Squiffy Yoxborough. Got that?

  Once again, sorry about the Fourth of June. (Mind you, someone else is going to be even sorrier.) I’ll see to it you get better parents for the Eton and Harrow Match.

  This letter, with the customary greasy oncers, will go out through Blue Phil, as per usual. Look after yourself, Son, and remember – keep a straight bat.

  Your loving father,

  Nobby Chesterfield

  FALSE SCENT

  The body of fifty-five-year-old Ralph Rudgwick was discovered by his wife, Jane, on the Sunday evening when she returned from a weekend water-colour painting course in the Lake District.

  He was lying in a tangle of sheets in the overheated bedroom of their house near Henley, dressed only in a royal blue shirt, the front of which was plastered to his body with the brown blood that had spread from three bullet-holes in his chest.

  His other clothes, Jane Rudgwick told Detective Inspector Bury, had been lying in an abandoned heap on the floor. She had hung up the trousers and aligned the shoes with his others in the wardrobe. The boxer shorts and socks she had placed in the dirty-clothes basket.

  When the Inspector asked her why she had done this before contacting the police, she seemed at a loss. ‘Well, I like to have everything tidy,’ she had replied, puzzled by his question.

  At first he had put the reaction down to shock. Discovering your husband murdered must be one of the most traumatic experiences in the life of any woman, and logical behaviour should perhaps not be expected at such a moment.

  Anyway, at their first interview, it seemed incongruous to suspect anything sinister about Jane Rudgwick. She was a strange, vulnerable little woman, the wrong side of fifty, from whom all colour seemed slowly to have seeped away. Her face, and her flowered cotton dress, were as anaemically pastel as the decor of the obsessively neat sitting room in which they sat talking.

  The eyes, blinking through transparent-framed glasses, were pink with crying, and she kept breaking down and rushing off to the bathroom to recover herself. From these sorties she would return with eyes redder than ever, and surrounded by a haze of cheap flowery perfume, as though she believed, pathetically, that that could cover up, or sanitize, or even dispel the ugliness that had invaded her life.

  It was only when, the following morning, Detective Inspector Bury interviewed Jacob Keynes, Ralph Rudgwick’s partner in the Keynes Rudgwick G
allery, that his suspicions began to move towards the dead man’s wife.

  The gallery was Cork Street smart, its narrow glass frontage dominated by a huge abstract oil in strident primary colours. The name of the painter, an unsolved anagram of Middle-European consonants, meant nothing to Detective Inspector Bury. But then he would never have claimed to know anything about art.

  Jacob Keynes also favoured primary colours, a scarlet jacket of generous Italian cut over a yellow shirt and green trousers. His aftershave, an expensive, slightly sickly cologne, pervaded the atmosphere.

  He seemed neither upset nor surprised by the news of his partner’s murder.

  ‘So the worm finally turned,’ was his first comment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Keynes?’ said Bury, urbanely unruffled, as his profession demanded. ‘Could you amplify that remark a little?’

  ‘Ah.’ The gallery owner was struck by doubt. ‘Well, perhaps I shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘I think, having gone that far, you should, Mr Keynes.’

  ‘Yes . . . I’m obviously not making any accusation or anything like that—’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘—but my first reaction to the news was, I’m afraid, to suspect Ralph’s wife of killing him.’

  ‘She being the worm you mentioned, the one who finally turned . . .?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And do you have any reason for your suspicion – except for the obvious one that most murders prove to have domestic motivations?’

  ‘I do have reasons, but I’m not sure that I should . . .’

  ‘Once again, I think you absolutely should, Mr Keynes.’

  ‘Right. Well, you’ll find out soon enough from someone else if I don’t tell you. Ralph was perhaps not the most faithful of husbands.’

  ‘Ah. He had a lot of girlfriends?’

  ‘Over the years there have been a few.’

  ‘And do you think his wife knew about them?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Maybe not. None of them was very serious or lasted very long. However, recently . . .’

  ‘Yes, Mr Keynes? Recently . . .?’ said Bury, deterring another attack of reticence.

  ‘Recently Ralph had got into a more serious extramarital relationship.’