Young Petrella

by Michael Gilbert

  Copyright & Information

  Young Petrella

  First published in 1988

  © Estate of Michael Gilbert; House of Stratus 1988-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755105311 9780755105311 Print

  0755132106 9780755132102 Kindle

  0755132475 9780755132478 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Born in Lincolnshire, England, Michael Francis Gilbert graduated in law from the University of London in 1937, shortly after which he first spent some time teaching at a prep-school which was followed by six years serving with the Royal Horse Artillery. During World War II he was captured following service in North Africa and Italy, and his prisoner-of-war experiences later leading to the writing of the acclaimed novel ‘Death in Captivity’ in 1952.

  After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor in London, but his writing continued throughout his legal career and in addition to novels he wrote stage plays and scripts for radio and television. He is, however, best remembered for his novels, which have been described as witty and meticulously-plotted espionage and police procedural thrillers, but which exemplify realism.

  HRF Keating stated that ‘Smallbone Deceased’ was amongst the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "The plot," wrote Keating, "is in every way as good as those of Agatha Christie at her best: as neatly dovetailed, as inherently complex yet retaining a decent credibility, and as full of cunningly-suggested red herrings." It featured Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who went on to appear in later novels and short stories, and another series was built around Patrick Petrella, a London based police constable (later promoted) who was fluent in four languages and had a love for both poetry and fine wine. Other memorable characters around which Gilbert built stories included Calder and Behrens. They are elderly but quite amiable agents, who are nonetheless ruthless and prepared to take on tasks too much at the dirty end of the business for their younger colleagues. They are brought out of retirement periodically upon receiving a bank statement containing a code.

  Much of Michael Gilbert’s writing was done on the train as he travelled from home to his office in London: "I always take a latish train to work," he explained in 1980, "and, of course, I go first class. I have no trouble in writing because I prepare a thorough synopsis beforehand.". After retirement from the law, however, he nevertheless continued and also reviewed for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, as well as editing ‘The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes’.

  Gilbert was appointed CBE in 1980. Generally regarded as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the British crime writing fraternity, he was a founder-member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, before receiving the Lifetime ‘Anthony’ Achievement award at the 1990 Boucheron in London.

  Michael Gilbert died in 2006, aged ninety three, and was survived by his wife and their two sons and five daughters.

  Introduction

  I have great affection for Patrick Petrella. My own youth as a writer and his youth as a policeman started together on the northern heights of London.

  Time jerks by so quickly and so violently that these stories have become, in a sense, history. They tell of a time when the picture of the Metropolitan Police, as viewed by the public and their elected local representatives, differed significantly from the picture as it is seen today.

  To the criminal the policeman has always been a natural enemy. To the vast majority of the people, who are not criminals, he used to be, just as naturally, a friend.

  The criminal’s outlook has not, I think, changed. He and the policeman are both professionals engaged in a job of work. When professionals come into opposition there is a fight. Sometimes one side wins. Sometimes the other. There is little rancour.

  With some sections of the public, however, there has unquestionably been a change. And whatever side one takes, no one can deny that it is a change for the worse. There exist now people, both black and white, who consider themselves to be oppressed. To them, quite naturally, the police are the arms of the oppressor. Summing up the opinions of a selected group of black youths, the researchers of the Policy Studies Institute recorded: “Everyone in the group held unfavourable or highly unfavourable attitudes towards the police force, ranging from deep bitterness and resentment to feelings of hatred and animosity.” This report was written in 1983, some twenty-five years after the period covered by these stories. Had such a view been generally current at the time it would, no doubt, have tinged them with darker colours.

  The difficulties which Petrella did encounter have not been minimised. His superior officers often viewed the young man with a suspicion which was, I am afraid, sometimes well-founded. “Do you know,” Superintendent Barstow asked him, “why God gave young policemen two feet but only one head?” In two of the earlier stories I introduced Councillor Hayes, who was openly hostile to the police. The editor of the magazine in which the stories were appearing was upset. Surely, she said, I was exaggerating. Members of the Council would support, not oppose, the efforts of their own force. Readers of today’s press reports must judge for themselves whether I was exaggerating or understating the case.

  So read the stories as history, as annals of a time lighter in some respects, darker in others, and differing in ways both large and small from the present. A time when £50 was a lot of money. A time when there were no such things as riot squads, and police were organised into divisions, not districts; a time when policemen might hope, if they did their job properly, to control the illegal import of cocaine; a time when the blue lamp did not mark the headquarters of a band of oppressors but was a lighthouse, shining hopefully in a dark and frightening street.

  Prologue

  The Conspirators

  Every August, whilst Patrick Petrella was a detective constable up at Highside, the circus and funfair appeared on the Heath. If duty took him there, Petrella cut his visit as short as possible. Otherwise, his colleagues noticed, he avoided it altogether. Later, when he was promoted, and married, his wife remarked on the same peculiarity. He had not bothered to explain it to his colleagues at Highside. And he hesitated to do so even to his wife, from whom he had few secrets. In the end, he did tell her about it.

  They were motoring in France, and had stopped in a village to buy stores for their midday meal. On the whitewashed wall, outside the mairie, a poster, faded by the hot sun of Provence, advertised the Cirque Jacquetti.

  “Goodness,” said Petrella, “I wonder if Sam Borner still runs it. I don’t think he can do. He must be eighty, if he’s still alive.”

  “Please tell me about Sam,” said Jane, in her most irresistible voice.

  Still Petrella hesitated. For it had all happened a l
ong time ago. And it had been the first time he had grasped the fact that hate can be more compelling than love; and the first time that he had seen, in action, a conspiracy to kill. The passage of time had buried these events deep, but small things – the distant roar of a caged lion, a clockwork clown tumbling about the pavement, a tattered circus poster – still had the power to twitch at his nerves.

  “I’ll tell you when we stop for lunch,” he said. “It was my first murder case. I was eleven years old at the time.”

  When you are young, each summer hangs on a thread of remembrance. A sight, a sound, a smell. To Patrick Petrella, that pre-war summer at Perpignan hung on a poster. Not faded and fly-blown like the one he had just seen, but eye-catching in its glorious colours. It depicted two white horses, in harness of black leather and trappings of gold, cantering round a sawdust ring, each ridden by a slender, graceful, grave-eyed lemur, dressed in a lady’s riding-habit with a tiny crimson cap on one side of its furry head.

  Patrick was vague as to why his family were in Perpignan – as vague as to why they had spent the summer before in Cairo or the summer before that in Casablanca. He knew that his father worked for the Spanish Government, and he surmised that it was government business whch had brought them to the French side of the Pyrenees. It was something to do with refugees, and every now and then they would go for long drives through the mountains, meeting French and Spanish policemen and shepherds and muleteers on both sides of the frontier. But for the most part his father was closeted with Monsieur le Commissaire Theron, in the police station, and Patrick was free to amuse himself.

  As well as his native Spanish he spoke streetboy Arabic and French, and he slipped about the sunlit streets of Perpignan, a thin, dark, friendly shadow, making new acquaintances along the river front, dropping one, picking up another, listening more than he spoke. It did not take him long to discover the Cirque Jacquetti in the Champ des Martyrs, the little plateau on the inland side of the city where the dragoons had shot and sabred more than a hundred unarmed Huguenots during the Repression.

  The Champ des Martyrs was the permanent base of the Jacquettis. It was from there that its component parts, the first and second-ring circuses, and the funfair, sometimes operating with the circus, and sometimes on its own, went out on planned marches, south to the Rock of Gibraltar, north as far as Bruges and Ostend, where they met, but did not trespass on, the territory of the other great European troupe, the German Müller-Hilde. Perpignan was their base. Patrick liked it best when, as now, it was almost empty. August was the peak of the trouping season. All that was left behind, inside the high wire perimeter, was a shed full of old funfair machinery, a row of caravans, most of them empty, the cages where the big cats lived, the stables for the horses, the kennels for the dogs, and a handful of people.

  Manfredo and Ramon were called brothers, although, in the complicated in-breeding of circus life, no one quite knew whether they were really brothers, half-brothers, or cousins. Both were swarthy, handsome and attractive, and both were bullies, in the way that men who spend their lives controlling big cats often are.

  Domenico Stromboli, who came from Naples, looked after the dogs. Or, to be truthful, the dogs looked after Stromboli. He was a cripple. Polio had reduced his arms and one of his legs to withered sticks. The circus had built him a little padded carriage, which two of the six Alsatians took turns to pull. He had first appeared, to Patrick’s fascinated gaze, driving at a hand-canter across the wide and dusty compound, with two Alsatian dogs running escort in front of him and two more behind, surrounded by a tumbling, snapping, skirmishing pack of poodles.

  Patrick had got into the closely guarded enclosure by the kindness of his special friend, Auguste. Auguste was a stand-in clown. He looked after the horses. His particular charges were Rosalie and Marguerite, the beautiful white thoroughbreds, whose likeness Patrick had so often admired on the poster. They were resting for a few weeks. Sam Borner, who had married, twenty years before, into the Jacquetti family, and had now the controlling voice in the circus, knew the virtue of not overdriving a willing and successful turn.

  “That’s his caravan,” said Auguste. “Would you like to have a peep at it?”

  “I’d like to very much,” said Petrella. “If he wouldn’t mind.”

  “He’s in town, with Donna. Nina may be there. She won’t tell on us.”

  They climbed the stairs and opened the door, cut in two halves, heavy as a lock gate, built to last, like everything in that wonderful vehicle.

  Patrick thought he had never seen anything so entrancing in his whole life. It was at once snug and spacious, and entirely beautiful.

  Everything that could shine, shone. The polished teakwood tables, and settles and built-in cupboards; the brass fittings of the lamps, and the window and door fittings, and the ship’s chronometer above the stove, itself a gleaming altar of glazed brick and winking steel. In one corner stood the cage where Leopold and Lorenzo, the riding lemurs lived. They sat on a log and stared back at Patrick as he gazed, round-eyed, at them.

  Lorenzo wrinkled up his eyes, and lifted his upper lip.

  “He’s laughing at me,” said Patrick.

  “Laughing at me,” agreed a gruff voice behind him. Patrick swung round.

  The largest parrot he had ever seen was sitting on a table behind the door.

  He was dark bottle-green all over, except for plum-coloured ruffs around his legs. His head was cocked on one side, and a single round yellow eye was fixed on the boy.

  “Oh,” said Patrick. “Oh, what a beauty.”

  “What a beauty,” said the bird complacently. It swung down neatly from the rail on top of the cupboard and waddled along the window-seat.

  “Stand still,” said Auguste. “Quite still. He likes you, I think.”

  “W-what,” said Patrick, “w-w-would he do if he didn’t?”

  “Bite your ear off,” said Auguste. “Just you ask Ramon or Manfredo. It’s war to the knife between them and Nestor. They used to tease him – pull his tail feathers out. He bit Manfredo through the thumb. Nearly cut it off.”

  Patrick watched the parrot, scarcely daring to breathe. It sidled along the tabletop towards him, still transfixing him with one unwinking yellow eye. Then it dipped its green head suddenly forward, caught the corner of Patrick’s handkerchief, and whipped it out of his pocket.

  “Hey!” said Patrick.

  “Hey!” said the parrot, dropped the handkerchief and broke into a scream of laughter.

  “He does like you, see,” said a long-legged, dark-haired girl. She had come out of the back part of the caravan, where she had been tidying and cleaning the bedroom. “If he takes something of yours, it shows he likes you.”

  She picked up the parrot without fuss, held it in one hand, and smoothed its head feathers with the other. The parrot preened itself.

  “This person is Nina,” said Auguste. “She is a wonderful girl. She is loved by all creatures, and fears none.”

  Although he was only eleven, Patrick was an observant boy, and when Auguste said “creatures” it occurred to him that he might be including two-legged creatures as well. She was a very attractive girl.

  The week that followed was a week of unmixed delight. Tolerated by old Stromboli, encouraged by Auguste and Nina, he explored every corner of the Jacquetti encampment. He avoided Ramon and Manfredo and studied the great Sam Borner, owner and boss of the Jacquettis, and his wife Donna, from a respectful distance. But these were only the humans. It was the animals which entranced him. The six great Alsatian dogs, who were the policemen of the kingdom, and the tumbling crowd of poodles who formed the CID – sharp-eyed, sneaky, ubiquitous. The old circus horses, their working life over, who lived at ease, grazing behind the caravans by day and stabled by night in the shed opposite Sam Borner’s caravan. Rosalie and Marguerite, queens of the ring, each with a stall of her own, with a name on a shingle nailed over it; the great cats, in their cages at the far end of the enclosure, to be watched like
Ramon and Manfredo, but not approached. White doves which lived on the rafters of the pony shed, and would come to Nina when she whistled. A marmoset which shared Auguste’s caravan, and spent its day vainly trying to catch the pigeons. Leopold and Lorenzo the lemurs, who could ride and look after horses as well as any stable boy, who lived in Sam Borner’s caravan, and were taken out of their cage by Nina every afternoon for a walk on long leather leads; and Nestor the parrot, said to be more than a hundred years old, and very wise.

  It was at the end of that week, on the Sunday morning, that Monsieur Theron came to call on Patrick’s father.

  Their talk took place in the front sitting room, a place of French rectitude and gloom. M. Theron was a middle-aged Basque with a short brown beard and a deceptively mild appearance. It was later to deceive the Germans, to their undoing. Patrick sat, unnoticed, in a corner behind a table covered with family photographs. He listened, in growing horror, to what was being recounted.

  “Dead,” said M. Theron. “The skull fractured by a single blow.”

  “How long?”

  “Discovered at six o’clock this morning. The doctor said that death must have occurred at least five hours before. Not more than seven.”

  “Died about midnight, then,” said Patrick’s father.

  Patrick had heard only scraps of the earlier conversation. He had thought they were talking about refugees. Now he wished that he had listened. Because it was to do with the circus. Someone had been killed.

  “We have held his brother for questioning.”

  So! It was Manfredo or Ramon. Patrick felt a sense of relief. It would have been terrible if it had been one of his friends: Auguste, or Nina, or Stromboli. Even the majestic Sam Borner, or his kindly little wife. If someone had to be dead, better one of the savage Spaniards.