He stared vacantly at the interior of the store in order to confirm this fact and it was then that he noticed a rusty hook, high up on the left-hand post of the door frame.
It was the place, he remembered, where old Toni Biretta had hung his store key during daylight hours. Toni had never taken precautions against thieves, for he had always lived on his premises and the risk of daylight robbery was therefore negligible. Every day, when he was passing in and out of the store, Toni had hung the key on that hook and every night, when he locked up, he had lifted it from the hook and carried it up to his bedroom.
In those days, therefore, there had been two store keys and one of the originals was now on Archie’s key-ring. What then had happened to the other after Toni had died? Archie could not recall ever having seen it again!
As he thought this the entire situation began to clarify. Someone who knew about the money also knew about Toni’s key, and that someone must have retained the key all these years, waiting and waiting for a chance to use it…
“Maria!”
He screamed the word as he flung himself out of the car. Maria had the key and Maria must have heard about the vault from Anthony, either by letter, or by word of mouth before the boy sailed for the Middle East! It was Maria who had robbed him, awaiting her opportunity, and probably watching him drive away from the house on one of his routine visits to the branches, or perhaps when she knew he was due in court and safely out of the way! Maria must have chosen this way to get even with him and it therefore followed that Maria must hate him with the vehemence that he reserved for the Inland Revenue, or the lean men who had caught him red-handed at the pond!
The more he thought about it the more certain he was of her guilt and of the pitiless treachery of the woman. The diabolical, Italianate cunning of her plot rose in his throat and almost choked him with fury. He ran into the yard, jumped into the car and reversed rapidly into the Avenue, almost colliding with Edith Clegg, who was walking along the pavement towards Number Four.
Without stopping to apologise, or to close either yard gates or store door, he roared into Shirley Rise, turned right at the junction and shot away towards Croydon and the Guildford Road.
He was heading for Somerset. He was going to get his money back if he had to beat Maria to a pulp to get it.
He never reached Somerset.
Once he had picked up the main coast road he felt a desperate need for a drink and stopped at a roadhouse, a few miles on his journey. He was well known at the pub and the barman, apologising for the house’s lack of whisky, served him with two double gins.
Then Archie remembered that he had a half-bottle of brandy in the tool kit of the car. It was kept there for an emergency, just as his iron-rations had been put aside in the vault. He went out and found it and before starting up he gulped down the equivalent of half a dozen measures.
Then he set off again, leaving the built-up area at a steady fifty, his tyres screaming round the bends when he applied his footbrake, his body hunched over the wheel and his knuckles white with the intensity of his grip. About noon it began to rain but he did not slacken his speed. When the brandy bottle was empty he threw it over his shoulder into the space reserved for the folding hood.
He hardly saw the little cloud of cyclists, who emerged from a builder’s yard at the entrance to the long, straggling village he swept through. He came tearing round a bend, his offside wheels a clear two feet over the white line and somebody on the pavement screamed. Archie, hearing the scream, automatically applied his brake, so that the big car skidded along the greasy surface, slewed round, and then went slithering forward at a barely reduced speed. It scattered the cyclists, spilling them in all directions, before shooting off at a fresh angle and crashing broadside on into a tall lamp-standard. Even this failed to stop it, for it glanced off the standard and finally came to rest in a shop doorway, missing two women shoppers by inches.
Archie himself was not seriously injured. The heavy car was coachbuilt and the chassis had absorbed the series of impacts. His head was cut open by the edge of the mirror and his knees by violent contact with the dashboard. They took him away in the first of the three ambulances. In the ambulance that followed were two of the injured, a cyclist and an A.T.S. girl, who had been struck by the falling standard. The A.T.S. girl died on her way to hospital.
Archie regained consciousness about an hour after they had stitched his wounds. The first thing he saw, when he opened his eyes, was a policeman sitting beside his bed, a pencil in his hand and an open notebook on his knee.
Archie stared at the policeman without speaking. He was fascinated by the hostility in the man’s eyes.
CHAPTER XVI
End Of A Quest
THE DAY THAT Archie left hospital and limped down to attend the inquest on the victim of the crash, proved a notable one in the life of Jean McInroy, commercial artist, occupier of Edith Clegg’s first-floor-front, and patient seeker of Britain’s Ideal Male.
Many people along the Avenue, where Jean had now resided for nearly a decade, pitied Jean McInroy. They told each other that it was cruel that such an engaging and pretty girl should have her life blighted by a shocking impediment of speech, a defect that not only precluded marriage, but even prevented her from conversing with anyone who was unfamiliar with her disability and could not therefore be expected to understand her mumblings, and supplementary gestures.
It would have been much better, thought Harold Godbeer, and other kind souls like him, if Jean had been born deaf and dumb, for there was a certain dignity about a deaf mute that was altogether lacking in a pretty woman, with a deeply cleft palate. Most of the Avenue males were slightly embarrassed when they passed Jean coming out of Number Four, but they had all learned to smile at her, and raise their hats, and they were always rewarded by a shy smile acknowledging the gesture. No one except Edith however, went as far as to speak to her, but Edith had always had a way with the sick and disabled and after Jean had come to live with her, and Ted Hartnell had married and moved over to Forty Five, she was a mother to the girl, showering upon her the affection that had once been Ted’s.
The Avenue’s pity was largely wasted on Jean McInroy. She was not addicted to self-pity and the war that had brought misery and deprivation to so many people along the crescent brought Jean McInroy fulfilment in the person of Chief Officer Hargreaves, of the A.F.S., an organisation which Jean had joined in September, 1938, when she found herself unable to share Mr. Chamberlain’s optimism.
In addition to possessing a very pretty face, a trim figure, plenty of Scottish common sense, and a sufficiency of talent with pens and Indian ink to earn a living illustrating advertisement copy and magazine stories, Jean possessed the rare privilege of being able to draw her dreams on paper.
For many years, prior to the outbreak of war, she had been steadily sketching her Ideal British Male, the solid, sunburned, pipe-smoking, home-making, rose-growing paragon of every domestic virtue in the glossies and the not-so-glossies, the man who looked equally attractive (but virile) in morning dress or bathing trunks, the man whose firm chin had been lathered by every brand of brushless shaving cream, the husband whose Empire-building eyes smiled at wife and kiddies from a kind of suburban Olympus, promising tenderness, fidelity and security to every woman who met his frank, manly, leave-it-to-hubby-darling gaze.
In the course of the last ten years Jean must have sketched thousands of Philips (she had always called him Philip and could never think of him by any other name) but it was not until war broke out, and she was attached as part-time driver to the local A.F.S., that she actually came face to face with him in the person of Chief Officer Hargreaves.
From that moment on her war-work became a pleasure. She drilled with fanaticism and once the blitz had begun, and she began to attend incidents in the company of Mr. Hargreaves, she soon distinguished herself by displaying a devotion to duty that earned her more than one citation in the official records.
She followed on the
heels of Mr. Hargreaves like a faithful spaniel and when she became full-time, and Hargreaves needed a messenger, a driver, a tea-brewer, or a plotter, she was always the person selected, if only because she was at his elbow.
As time went on he began to notice her but in a vague and indeterminate way. When somebody told him about her cleft palate he went out of his way to be kind and considerate towards her, patting her shoulders and telling her she could leave early, or bringing her his cup to be washed and offering her a cigarette from his long, leather case.
She accepted these attentions shyly but never once pressed her advantage for she had discovered that he was unmarried and that his name was Philip, and she felt that these two coincidences had already marked him out for her. She was quite sure that if she bided her time then circumstances would surely arrive that would reveal her to him as his predestined mate. She was equally convinced that to do anything to hasten this revelation, would be unpardonable interference with the Divine Plan.
This childlike faith in Divine Justice came very easily to Jean. She was a tranquil, undemanding girl, reared on the Old Testament, and it did not seem unreasonable to her to believe that a God who could feed fugitives with manna, or cause water to gush from a rock, was also capable of steering her into the chaste embrace of the Ideal British Male, providing, of course, that she continued to play the game with God, and strove to be worthy of His interest.
She was nearly thirty now, however, and up to the time that she had joined the A.F.S. God did seem to be taking his time in the matter. It was not until she had sat through Chief Officer Hargreaves’ first lecture on the use of a stirrup-pump that Jean’s mind was set at rest and she knew that, sooner or later, something would happen to bring them together.
Sure enough something did happen and in the matter of Jean and her Ideal Male God ultimately behaved very well indeed, even going so far as to perform a small miracle in order to establish their relationship on a permanent basis.
Philip Hargreaves demanded even less of life than Jean. For years now he had shared a semi-detached house at Wickham with his elderly mother, and prior to entering the A.F.S. he had been manager of a small estate agency in Beckenham.
Such associations as he had formed with the girls that he met in his twenties and early thirties had not developed very far beyond the hat-raising stage, for long ago Philip had set himself a matrimonial target, and this target had never been reached.
Soon after getting his first job he had read somewhere that a man was foolish to marry on less than five hundred a year and because he was a very careful young man he had taken this advice to heart and had acted upon it.
Although his salary and commission had actually reached this figure in 1939 he was by then contributing two pounds ten shillings a week towards his mother’s housekeeping purse, and he therefore considered he was still a hundred and fifty a year short of his target.
He was thirty-six now, still prudent, and much addicted to minute planning. He planned everything. If he intended using his Morris Minor on Sunday then he spent Saturday evening checking its tyres, water, oil, petrol and ignition. If he intended taking a holiday in August, then he booked his accommodation the previous October. Every detail of his life was planned in advance. The clothes he intended to wear on Monday were selected, and laid out in the spare room, before he undressed on Sunday night. He made long and detailed shopping lists for his mother and noted down the times when the shops were unlikely to be busy. He owned four pairs of shoes and chose a different pair every day, so that the soles of one pair were never more worn than any of the others. He was an excessively punctual man and had never been known to keep anybody waiting a single second. His preparations for everything that he did were made, as he was fond of telling people, in order to save time, but as his waggish brother Fred once remarked: “Phil never tells us what in hell he does with all the time he saves!”
Probably he used it to plan future economies of other people’s time and efforts, and therefore his brother’s supplementary opinion, that ‘Phil was a bloody old maid’ was unjust and abusive. Old maid or not he was a first-class fireman and his unit ran like clockwork.
The men and the girls at the depot put up with Philip’s fussiness because they had seen him in action and had learned to respect his coolness and personal courage. It might have been argued that his coolness in action was merely the result of minute planning, whereas his contempt for physical danger was simply the evidence of a dull, unimaginative mind. Young Simpson, his deputy, held this opinion, putting forward the theory that Hargreaves was the kind of man who collects a medal on the battlefield by walking straight up to the enemy, demanding their surrender and getting it. Be that as it may, Hargreaves was superb in action. He did not flinch, or cower, or crawl because he was incapable of imagining death or disablement. Other men got hurt, of course, but usually through lack of planning. Nothing ever happened to people who planned, and attended to detail.
It was Philip Hargreaves’ addiction to long-term planning that led to the temporary dispersal of his unit in the suburb.
Between the summer of 1941, and the spring of 1942, there was little aerial activity in South London and having brought his men and girls to a high pitch of efficiency during the winter, Philip now found that their morale was being adversely affected by enforced idleness.
He therefore sent a long memo to headquarters, suggesting that part of his section should be converted into a mobile reserve, ready to be rushed to any point in the country where extra firemen were badly needed.
His memo coincided with the commencement of the heavier raids on the provinces and it was during the hammering of Bristol that part of the local fire personnel, including Philip and Jean, were sent down to the West for a tour of duty.
Here, in a terraced house in the battered suburb of Bedminster, God performed his little miracle for Jean McInroy, of Number Four.
It began about eleven p.m., on the fourth successive night that the area had been raided.
The unit was summoned to a short street off the Bath Road, where a shower of incendiaries had started a serious fire in a small biscuit factory, set in the heart of a thickly-populated working-class district.
The blaze was promptly tackled and was soon under control, but before Philip judged it safe to move elsewhere, leaving a picket behind at the factory, a distraught man accosted him and told him that a child had been trapped in the basement of a half-demolished house a short distance down the street.
Philip directed him to the heavy rescue squad but the man was back almost immediately with news that the squad had its hands full two streets away; he begged Philip to send a couple of men to assist him in extricating the child.
The factory blaze was now well under control, so Philip called Jean and they hurried after the man, scrambling in single file over a tangle of hoses and debris and approaching the house by its short back garden. A hysterical woman met them in the alley and a man perched on the next-door fence called out:
“Watch out, guv! There’s an unexploded bomb in there!”
Jean heard the warning but Philip, a few yards in advance of her apparently did not, for he scrambled over the rubble and at once entered the house through the kitchen window.
Almost immediately there was a long, dull roar and a blast wave that threw Jean flat on her back. The man close by tumbled off the fence but he reappeared almost at once shouting:
“Christ! I told him, didn’t I? You ’eard me tell him, didn’t you?”
For a few moments Jean was too dazed by the force of the explosion to understand what had happened. Men came running and a searchlight was turned on the back of the houses. As the dust settled horror overwhelmed her and she cried out, scrambling up and running towards the spot where the Ideal British Male had disappeared a moment before.
Other men appeared on the scene with more lights and somebody wearing a steel-helmet grasped Jean by the shoulder and shook her, demanding to know if anyone was inside the house when
the explosion occurred.
“He was,” she shouted, “he was! He was going in after a child…!” but he could not have understood her, for he kept repeating his question until she broke away and began to scrabble among the broken beams and bricks with her hands.
Others joined her and soon they were able to open up a hold that led into a small tunnel, formed by the ceilings and floor joists, supported by the stove and the big copper.
“Somebody can crawl in there, and look around,” said the Warden, who had now taken charge. “Who’s the skinniest round here?”
Before a volunteer could present himself Jean had dropped on her hands and knees and wormed her way into the triangular opening.
“You watch out, Miss,” the warden called after her, “I can smell burning!”
Jean could smell burning too and saw that it came from some smouldering linoleum, half-screening the stove. The fumes made her cough and splutter as she crawled further into the house. In spite of a powerful beam, trained directly on the tunnel, she could see very little, for her body was blocking the small exit and the entire first floor seemed to have collapsed beyond the passage that led out of the kitchen.
She worked her hand down towards her thigh-pocket and dragged out her own torch, flicking it on and forcing her arm over her head so as to project the beam into the mass of obstacles ahead. Then she saw him, or rather his rubber thigh boots, projecting from beneath a joist so tightly wedged that it might have been cemented into the passage walls.
She tried to call, “Chiefie!”, but the fumes of the smouldering linoleum caught her by the throat and she could only choke and writhe, her body full-length on the floor and her face touching the powdered plaster.
She lay still for a moment, unheeding the shouting behind her, seeing only the two upturned rubber soles less than a foot in front of her. When the spasm subsided she forced the beam of her torch to perform a half-circle and noted, about a yard to her right, a small space where she thought she might have room to rise to her knees and get her shoulders under the joist blocking the passage.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 23