The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “I’ll get my dad,” she said, whirled away into the shadowy forge and shouted to him over the hammer blows. Davy Davitt followed her into the sunshine, still wearing his thick leather farrier’s apron and when he saw the motor car by his petrol pump his face lit up.

  “Twelve horse power Rover, nice cars, six hundred pounds new,” he murmured to himself. Then aloud, “What’s the trouble then, sir?”

  “Blessed axle gone,” the red-faced man said. “These roads are an insult to motor cars, not a yard of tarmac in the last twenty miles.”

  “Come far, have you?”

  “Far enough,” said the tall young man. “We started from Pontypridd.”

  His voice was Welsh too, bright and dancing. The red-faced man gave him a hard look.

  “Doesn’t matter to him where we started, Sonny. Question is, can he do something so we can get where we’re going to?”

  “Where’s that then?” Davy asked.

  “London. And we’re in a hurry.”

  Even though the red-faced man’s voice was impatient, they were some of the sweetest words in the language to Davy. In seconds he was horizontal under the car, with the man bending himself double to try to see what was happening. Nobody was paying much attention to the other young man who’d been in the driving seat. He’d got out and was sitting, calm and contented in the sunshine, on the low stone wall between the house and the yard, looking at Molly. And Molly was staring enchanted at the man called Sonny because she’d just heard from his lips some of the sweetest words in the language to her.

  “Would there be anywhere here with a telephone I could use?”

  Proudly she led him to the kiosk and sat on the step of the war memorial to watch. She always liked to watch on the very rare occasions when people used the telephone, grieved by their hesitations and fumblings. Sonny was different. He didn’t pause to read the card of instructions, or drop coins on the concrete floor or fidget with doubt or embarrassment. He simply picked up the receiver and spoke into it as if it were a thing he did every day, easy as washing your hands. She saw a smile on his face and his lips moving and knew he must be giving a number to the distant operator then he must have been connected to his number because his lips were moving again though she couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  “Blessed car’s broken down, back of beyond. No sign of them though. Didn’t guess we’d be going this way.”

  He was speaking to his father, who ran a boxers’ training gymnasium in Pontypridd.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, boy. They’re right behind you. Left Cardiff early this morning in a black Austin 20, heading same way as you.”

  “How did they know, then?”

  “Never mind that. Fact is, they do know. Tell Enoch. You at a garage?”

  “Blacksmith’s with a petrol pump.”

  “Can’t miss you then, can they?”

  “They can’t do anything to him, not in broad daylight.”

  “Only takes a little nudge, you know that. Elbow in wrong place, oh dear so sorry, damage done.”

  “Enoch and me wouldn’t let a flea’s elbow near him, let alone theirs.”

  “You look after our boy.”

  Molly watched as he came out of the kiosk looking worried.

  “Have you had bad news?”

  It didn’t strike her that she had no right to ask this of a stranger. He answered her with another question.

  “Your father good with cars, is he?”

  “Very good.”

  “We need to be moving, see? Quicker than I thought.”

  She caught his urgency and they practically ran back to the yard. By then her father was out from under the car and delivering his verdict. Beam axle gone and rear axle just holding together but wouldn’t make it to London. Both of them would need unbolting and welding.

  “How long?” the red-faced man asked.

  “Two or three hours, with luck.”

  “Make it two hours or less and, whatever your bill is, I’ll give you ten pounds on top of it.”

  Davy’s jaw dropped at the prospect of more money in two hours than he usually earned in a week. Then he went under the car with a spanner and Sonny, in his good suit and shiny shoes, went under too. Davy called out to Molly to go and tell Tick to make sure the fire in the forge was hot as he could make it. Tick was the apprentice, a large and powerful sixteen-year-old. Molly found him in the forge along with the other young man who’d been in the driving seat of the car and for an angry moment thought the two of them were fighting. Then she saw it was no more than play, the man dodging and dancing on the trodden earth floor among the scraps of metal and old horse-shoes, feet moving no more than an inch or two at a time, but enough to avoid the light punches Tick was aiming at him. A furious bellow came from behind them.

  “Rooster, are you bloody mad, boy? Come away from there.”

  It was the red-faced man.

  “Sorry, Uncle Enoch.”

  Obediently, the young man followed him out to the yard. Molly tried to give Tick her father’s instruction but could hardly get the boy to listen. His face was shiny with excitement.

  “Did you hear what he called him? I thought he might be, then I said to myself it couldn’t be. I’d only see’d him from a good way off and he looks different in his clothes. So I put my fists up, joking like, and he . . .”

  “What are you saying, Tick boy?”

  “The Rhonda Rooster, that’s all. He’s only the Rhonda Rooster!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Only the next British middleweight champion, that’s all. He’ll be fighting for the title in London the day after tomorrow and the money’s on him to win it.”

  “A boxer?”

  “Then he’ll take on the Empire champion after that. Could be world champion. When I see’d him at Cardiff he won by a knock-out in three rounds against a heavier man even though there was so much blood pouring down his face he could only see from one eye.”

  Molly was a country girl, not squeamish.

  “If he’s as good as you say, how come he’d got so much blood on him?”

  “He’s got a glass eyebrow.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what they call a weak spot. Hard as iron all the rest of him, only he’s got an old cut over his left eyebrow and if that opens up it pours with blood so the referee would have had to stop the fight if he hadn’t knocked the other chap out first.”

  It turned out that her father had heard of the Rhondda Rooster too because he got his head out from under the car just long enough to tell Molly to make the gentlemen comfortable in the front parlour and get them something to eat. She rushed round making tea in the good china pot, putting bread, cheese and cold beef on the best table cloth. Sonny had come out from under the car by then and she was conscious all the time of his eyes on her. The Rooster’s eyes were just as admiring if she’d noticed, but he was nothing beside Sonny – shoulders and chest too broad for the cut of his suit, one ear a bit skew-whiff, big hands that he kept bunching and flexing all the time they weren’t occupied with knife and fork. Under the stern eye of the red-faced man, Uncle Enoch, he had the clumsy good manners of a schoolboy, while Sonny seemed a man of the great world. Occupied with serving them, she missed another milestone in the speeding up of life in Tadley Gate. Another stranger went into the phone kiosk and picked up the receiver. It was the first time since the kiosk was built that it had been used more than once in a day.

  The new stranger was small, dark-haired, and twentyish, in a dark suit and cow-dung smeared shoes that hadn’t been designed for country walking. He looked round to see nobody was watching and slid quickly into the box as if glad of its protection from the country all around him. The number he wanted was at an east London exchange.

  “Bit of luck. Their car’s broken down.”

  “Have they seen you?”

  “Naw. We came over a hill and saw them pushing it. So we turned off before they saw us and Gribby and me followed them on
foot. Bleeding miles over the fields.”

  “Where’s Gribby?”

  “Keeping watch. Trouble is, they’ve all gone inside this house at the garage place.”

  “They’ll have to come out sometime.”

  “Won’t be easy, making it look like an accident.”

  “You could pay a boy to bung a stone at him.”

  “You joking?”

  “With what I’m paying you, don’t expect jokes as well. Next news I want to hear is the fight’s called off. Understood.”

  “Understood.”

  In the parlour, Uncle Enoch was restive.

  “I’m going to see how he’s doing with the car. You stay here, Sonny. Rooster can have another slice of beef if he likes but no more bread and for heaven’s sake don’t let him even sniff those pickled onions.”

  There was a tangle of briars and bushes at the back of the garden, clustering around the small stone building that sheltered the earth closet. Two rowans formed an arch over the pathway between the earth closet and the house. They’d been planted in a time when people still believed they kept away witches, all of fifty years ago, by Davy Davitt’s grandfather. Davy kept threatening to cut them down but never got round to it, so they formed a useful screen for Tod and Gribby. Tod came back from making his phone call and found his partner lurking in the bushes.

  “They still inside?”

  “The Rooster and the tall one are. His trainer’s gone inside the forge place. What’s that you got?”

  Tod held out his hand to show him. It was a rusty horseshoe, worn thin and sharp on one side.

  “What’s that for then? Bring The Rooster good luck?”

  “Some kind of luck.”

  Molly was in the kitchen, washing up. The Rooster was shifting around on his chair in the parlour. Because they’d started so early he’d missed his training run and his internal system was out of rhythm.

  “Where’s the little house then, Sonny boy?”

  “Down the path, back of the house.”

  The Rooster went down the path, under the rowan arch and into the stone building, latching the door behind him. Tod, watching from the bushes, gauged exactly the height of The Rooster’s left eyebrow against the rough stonework of the door frame. As soon as the latch clicked down he crept out and wedged the horsehoe into place between two blocks of stone, sharp side towards the privy, so that a man coming out couldn’t help run into it. The loud sigh of satisfaction that The Rooster gave from the inside when his business was done was echoed more quietly by Tod in the bushes.

  The Inspector stared out of the window at Constable Price’s potato patch.

  “So Tod and Gribby were in one car and the British middleweight champion just happened to be in the other,” he said.

  “He wasn’t that at the time, sir. He didn’t take the title until the fight in London two days later. But yes, they broke down in the village.”

  “Going from The Rhondda to London?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And Tod and his pal were driving from Cardiff to London?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And the shortest and best way from either place doesn’t go within miles of Tadley Gate, does it?”

  “No sir.”

  “So what in the world were both of them doing there?”

  “The statement from The Rooster’s uncle says he thought a country route might be calming for him.”

  “And Tod – was he doing it to calm his nerves as well?”

  “No sir. I’d suggest that the presence of both cars in Tadley Gate was not a coincidence.”

  “So you’ve got that far too. Go on.”

  “We know Tod worked for a bookie. We know there was a great deal of money riding on the outcome of that fight. Wouldn’t the bookie want to know how The Rooster was looking, the way they watch race-horses on the gallops?”

  “So Tod and Gribby go all the way to South Wales and back to spy on him.”

  “It’s one explanation, sir.”

  “And not a bad one”. The inspector gave him a re-considering look. “You’ve got a brain, constable. If you solved this one, I’m sure you could expect promotion to somewhere quite a lot livelier than here.”

  Constable Price tried not to let his alarm show. He liked his garden, his hens, his pig. His wife and children were healthy in the country air. He’d been born in a city and now devoted quite a lot of his considerable intelligence to making sure he wasn’t promoted back to one.

  “So what goes wrong?” the inspector said. “Assume Tod and Gribby are spying. The Rooster’s people might be annoyed about it, but not annoyed enough to beat Tod over the head with an iron bar. And remember the Rooster’s lot haven’t a trace of a criminal record among the three of them, unless you count Sonny Nelson being fined for doing forty-two miles an hour in Llandaff.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So we come to thieves falling out, then. Gribby’s got a record even longer than Tod’s and on the evidence you collected, he drove out of the village on his own and he was in a devil of a hurry to get his petrol tank filled.”

  The Rover was in the yard, with the repaired front axle bolted back in place. Sonny, Davy and Tick were carrying the rear axle from the forge, still warm from its welding. The Rooster had been forbidden to help so was back on the wall chatting to Molly who was sitting beside him but not getting anywhere with her because her attention was on Sonny. All of them were startled by the loud burping of a horn as a black Austin 20 drew up at the pump with a large man in a checked suit at the wheel. After a glance over his shoulder, Davy ignored him.

  “He’ll have to wait. Get this job seen to first.”

  They put the axle down by the Rover. Uncle Enoch watched, chest heaving as if the strain of waiting had been too much for him and his face had turned grey. Sonny looked concerned and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The horn went on burping.

  “Oh, serve him first and get him out of the way,” Sonny said. “We can spare a few minutes.”

  Enoch looked at him doubtfully and Davy hesitated, caught between the allure of repair work and a customer for petrol. An idea struck him.

  “Molly, you know how to work the pump. Go over and see to the gentleman.”

  She got up lightly from the wall and started crossing the yard, passing so close to Sonny that he caught a whiff of the perfume she’d bought herself in Birmingham and not used till then. Following his impulse he leaned towards her and said so softly under the noise of the horn that none of the others even knew he’d spoken: “Delay him, long as you can.” She gave him a gleaming glance, the slightest of nods and went on across the yard to the pump. The man in the check suit was out of the car by then with the petrol cap off, quivering with impatience. The sharp smell of his sweat mingled with petrol fumes. Molly fumbled with the hinged panel at the front of the pump. The Rooster seemed disposed to go across and help her but Sonny called to him sharply.

  “Rooster, I think I left my wallet on the parlour table. Go and see, would you?”

  The Rooster obligingly went back into the house. By then Davy and Tick were both under the Rover with spanners. Sonny took Enoch by the elbow and led him back into the shadows of forge.

  “Get a move on please, miss,” said the man with the Austin 20 to Molly. She’d managed to get the panel open but was staring at the pump mechanism inside as if she’d never seen it before. Eventually she remembered that the little wooden handle unfolded at right angles and began to wind it slowly anti-clockwise to draw up the petrol. The man wanted to do it for her but she wouldn’t let him. When she’d got the first gallon pumped up she turned the handle slowly clockwise to let it down into the tank. The bronze indicator needle by the pump mechanism moved to figure one. She looked at the driver of the Austin.

  “Is that it?”

  “No, of course it’s not. Fill her right up, for heaven’s sake.”

  In other circumstances Gribby would have tried flirting with her because she was undeniably a good
-looking girl. Now he could hardly restrain himself from hitting her. Slowly she pumped another gallon up and down, then another, his eyes on her, willing her to hurry. He looked away from her only once and then it was because some movement at the back of his car caught his attention. He swung round and there was Sonny standing there, his hand on the big black luggage trunk. The two men’s eyes met. Sonny returned the stare for a few moments then shrugged and moved away, as if he’d been admiring the car. It took Molly the best part of ten minutes to get the indicator to the ten-gallon figure and by that time Gribby was nearly gibbering with anger. He shoved some money at her, not waiting for change, then accelerated out of the yard in a cloud of dust and exhaust. Tick shouted after him as he went, “Hey, your trunk’s undone.” One of the straps round it was unbuckled and flapping. But the man at the wheel can’t have heard because he didn’t stop. Forty five minutes later, with Sonny driving, the repaired Rover followed more sedately. Sonny made sure that nobody saw him touch Molly’s hand or heard his whispered “Thank you.”

  The Rover turned on to the road past the common. “We’ll stop at the phone kiosk,” Sonny said. “Let them know we’re on our way again.”

  He slowed down as they came alongside it, almost stopped then accelerated away so clumsily that he almost stalled the engine. From the back the Rooster said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing wrong, Rooster. Just there’s somebody using it already. We’ll find another one further along.”

  Sonny and Enoch exchanged glances and from there on Sonny drove so smoothly that the Rooster slept most of the way to London.

  “So Gribby drives off in a hurry,” the inspector said. “Less than an hour later Rooster’s lot notice a man in a telephone kiosk. An hour or more after that, Miss Davitt finds Tod dead and her father sends the apprentice to tell you.”