The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “And I got there as soon as I could,” Constable Price said. When Tick arrived, breathless on an old bicycle, he’d been at a farm on the far side of his own village, investigating a case of ferret stealing. His wife sent his son running for him and he cycled from there as fast as a man could go on a police bike to the telephone kiosk in Tadley Gate.

  “And, judging by your report, you decided at once that whoever battered him over the head didn’t do it in the kiosk?”

  Constable Price regretted giving in to the temptation to be clever in his report, but couldn’t go back on it now.

  “There’d have been blood splashed all over the place, sir. As it was, he’d just bled down the back of his suit and onto the floor.”

  “Yes. So our assumption is that he managed to stagger to the phone kiosk from wherever Gribby hit him with the iron bar, probably intending to call for help.”

  “You think that’s what happened, sir?”

  “Speaks for itself. Then there was that trail of blood you noticed from the road to the kiosk, as if he’d dragged himself the last few yards. So they quarrel – probably over the money they’re getting paid for spying on the Rooster – Gribby bashes Tod over the head, leaves him for dead and scuttles back to London as soon as he’s got a full tank of petrol. Only Tod comes round and has just enough life left in him to make it as far as the phone kiosk but not enough to pick up the telephone.”

  Constable Price thought about it in his slow rural way. “So that’s it then, sir?”

  “Yes, but we’re never going to pin it on Gribby unless you turn up a witness. So work on it and keep me informed.”

  The inspector went back to his car – smaller and more battered than either the boxer’s or the villain’s – and headed back thankfully for the town. Constable Price went to feed his hens. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl watching a dead man in the phone kiosk.

  When the Rover left her father’s yard Molly was in a world she didn’t recognize any more. Her father and Tick were tidying their tools away, pleased with their day, talking about the Rooster. The murmur of their voices, the small metallic clanks, the lingering petrol smell, should have been familiar but she felt as if she’d been put down in a foreign country. Probably a nice enough country if you got to know it, but nothing that had any connection with her. From habit, she went in the kitchen, put a saucepan of water on the stove for her father to wash, boiled a couple of eggs for his tea since their visitors had eaten everything else. But as soon as she’d finished washing up she let her feet take her towards the common and the telephone kiosk. It was the link between herself and Sonny. She didn’t believe that the combined magic of her father’s motor mania and the telephone kiosk would bring him here and let him go again as if nothing had happened. The squeeze of her hand surely meant he’d be back – and how would he let her know that if not by telephone? Her heart gave a jolt when, from a distance, she saw a man in the kiosk. But it wasn’t Sonny, nothing like him, just a smaller man in a darker suit. Nobody she recognized, but on this day of wonders another stranger more or less made no difference. She sat on the steps of the war memorial, thinking about Sonny while the shadows of a summer afternoon grew long on the grass round her. Then cooling of the air made her realise that time had passed and the stranger was still there in the phone kiosk. Curiosity, then increasing alarm, made her hurry towards it.

  Once Tadley Gate knew that the body was a stranger’s everybody got on with haymaking before the weather broke. When the news got out that the dead man had been a criminal from London some people in the village implied that it was the fault of the phone kiosk and the petrol pump, which would naturally attract people like that. Once the police had finished in the kiosk a woman who usually did the cleaning in chapel took it on herself to scrub and disinfect it and people went back to not using it quite normally. Davy Davitt and Tick were more interested in The Rooster’s chances for the Empire and World titles. Constable Price sometimes discussed it with them. He’d taken to dropping in at the forge quite often these days. One day he had to go to the privy and noticed a rusty horsehoe with a sharp edge lying on the earth outside. It seemed a funny place for a horseshoe, but it was a farrier’s after all. Some of the bushes had been pushed back as if something heavy had landed there not long ago, but then you got boys fighting all over the place. Constable Price tried hard, but he couldn’t stop thinking. As for Molly, she strolled on the common within earshot of the telephone in the long evenings but apart from that got on with the cooking and accounts like any sensible girl. Then, one day when she was scrubbing a frying pan, two boys arrived running from the common with just enough breath between them to get out the news.

  “Miss, you’re wanted on the telephone.”

  She dropped the pan and ran to the kiosk with her apron still on.

  “Miss Davitt?” Sonny’s voice, distant and metallic but perfectly clear. He had to say it again before she managed to whisper a “yes” into the receiver. He apologized for not telephoning before. He’d had to stay in London with The Rooster and Uncle Enoch but would be driving himself home the next day and wondered if he might call in. “Yes,” she said again. For her first telephone call it was hardly a big speaking part, but it seemed to be all that was needed.

  When she got back to the yard, Constable Price was there, sitting on a wall in the sun. His bicycle was upside down and her father was doing something to its chain with pliers. He was looking at a magazine, open at an advertisement for the Austin 20. He stood up when he saw her.

  “Hello, Miss Davitt. Will you stay and talk to me?”

  Molly didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted to rush around shouting that Sonny had telephoned, was dropping in. But you couldn’t, of course. She sat down on the wall and Constable Price sat back down beside her.

  “Nice roomy cars, Austin 20s. Space for a good big trunk at the back.”

  She nodded, still not concentrating on what he was saying.

  “There was a good big trunk on the one the man was driving, the one who filled up with petrol here. Remember? Tick noticed it wasn’t properly fastened when the man drove out, only he was in too much of a hurry to stop.”

  She said nothing, but he felt something change in the air round her, as if it had suddenly gone brittle. “Stop now,” he said to himself. But something was throbbing in his brain, like a motor engine with the brake on.

  “I suppose nobody happened to open the trunk while he was getting his petrol?”

  “You wouldn’t.” She said it to the sparrows pecking in the dust. “Not to put in petrol.”

  He noticed it wasn’t an answer, felt the brake in his mind slipping.

  “So if there’d been anything in the trunk, you couldn’t have known?”

  She shook her head, still looking down.

  “Did he go anywhere near his trunk while you were putting in the petrol?”

  She murmured, “No”.

  “Or did anybody else?”

  She raised her head and looked at him. Such a look of desperation he’d only seen before in the eyes of a dog run over by a cart that he had to put out of its misery. He pulled on the mental brake, told his brain it couldn’t go along that road. If he persisted, she’d break down, tell him something he couldn’t ignore. She was a good girl, didn’t deserve trouble. He stood up.

  “Looks like your dad’s finished with my bicycle.”

  He waved to her over his shoulder as he pedalled away.

  Sonny came next day, in the Rover. He asked Davy if he’d be kind enough to have a look at the electrical starter, something not quite right about it. While he was working on it, Sonny and Molly strolled together in the sunshine on the common.

  “A promise I made Uncle Enoch,” he told her. “I’d never say a word to anybody, long as I lived, just one exception. If there was a girl I liked, I might have to tell her. If I could trust her, that is.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “I know. The Rooster matters to Enoch more
than all the world. Anything threatening him, he goes mad. And it was my fault, partly. If I’d done what he told me and not let The Rooster out of my sight, they wouldn’t have had their chance. When he came back to the parlour and I told him The Rooster was down at the little house on his own he rushed straight down there, just in time. A second later and The Rooster would have walked right into it. The wickedness of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we couldn’t let The Rooster know. It would have unsettled him. But we couldn’t leave the body there in the bushes because it might have caused trouble for you and your dad. So when I saw the other one driving into your yard, bold as brass, it came to me that if we put it in his trunk it would serve both of them right. And you played up to me. Without a word. Just trusted me.”

  “Yes.”

  As they walked, the back of his hand brushed lightly against hers.

  “Only it went wrong, you see? He must have noticed the trunk strap flapping just after he drove out of your yard. So when he looked in there and saw what he saw, all he could do was dump it in the phone kiosk. Only it happened to be you that found him. I’m sorry about that.”

  Their hands met palm to palm and stayed together.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  Later, when they’d been married for some time and Sonny was doing well in London as a boxing promoter, she had a telephone in her own home and talked to her friends on it nearly every day. Sonny was driving a Daimler by then with plenty of room at the back for the children and they sometimes used it to pop down to Tadley Gate, where her father had put up a proper garage sign and often filled up as many as half a dozen cars a day on summer weekends. Sometime between one visit and the next the Post Office took away Kiosk One and replaced it with a more imposing model, all bright red paint and glass panels. They gave it a glance as they drove past.

  The Hope of the World

  MAT COWARD

  It’s not easy to pigeon-hole Mat Coward, and that’s all to the good. There’s escape in versatility. He’s written science fiction, hard-boiled mysteries, humorous crime (check out his Edgar-nominated story “Twelve of the Little Buggers” in his collection Do the World a Favour), and reference books on humour, such as The Pocket Essentia] Classic Radio Comedy (2003). Occasionally he delves back into the past, and here takes us to the days before the planned communist revolution. It’s a country-house murder with a difference.

  Beneath a monkey-puzzle tree on the west lawn of his seat in Sussex, Lord Bognor and his guests were trying to settle on a date for the revolution. Capital, they all agreed, had clearly had its day; it was just choosing the day itself which was proving problematical.

  “Wednesday, September the tenth,” suggested Norbert Whistler.

  Lord Bognor flicked the pages of his appointments diary. “Wednesday the . . . ah, no, sorry. No good for me, I’m afraid – playing for the Old Boys against the Lord Chancellor’s XI.”

  Diana Lawrence clicked her teeth together in irritation. “Well, couldn’t you miss it, just this once?”

  Bognor sucked hot July air through a gap in his bottom teeth and compressed his face so that his eyebrows almost met his cheekbones. “Not really, old thing. You see, I’m opening bat – they rather rely on me. If it was any other game, perhaps, but the Lord Chancellor’s is a top team. I suppose if it rains . . .”

  “Oh look,” said Willie Browning, “I spy refreshments.”

  A butler and two kitchen maids, indeed, were making their unhurried way from the house, carrying between them a variety of large trays. The Special Arrangements Group of the Executive Committee of The Bolshevist League of Urgency adjourned for tea. This was on the afternoon prior to the violent unpleasantness, and it was such a lovely day.

  “What exactly is a flange-mounter?” asked Diana Lawrence, spraying flecks of seed cake towards Norbert Whistler, who sat on a lawn chair beside her.

  Norbert swallowed a gulp of tea. It should have been a sip, of course, in such company and in such a setting, but his throat was dry. “It’s rather complicated. Difficult to explain to the layman. It’s to do with flanges, you know, and the mounting thereof.”

  “Of course, silly of me. But we are so happy to have you here, Comrade Whistler – representing, as it were, the vanguard of the class-conscious proletariat! If one may put it that way.”

  “Quite so,” said Norbert, trying not to look up her skirt. She wasn’t a young woman, and it wasn’t a long skirt. At thirty-two, Norbert was the youngest man in the group by at least ten years, and he thought he sensed something hungry in Diana’s earnest, avian gaze.

  “I know Boggy, in particular, is delighted. You’re quite a catch, you know! Being, that is, the – I’m sorry, the Assistant Secretary . . . ?”

  “Assistant North-East Regional Secretary of the Consolidated Federation of Flange-Mounters and Correlated Crafts,” said Norbert, all on one breath because he feared that if he paused during the sentence he might be unable to complete it.

  “Rather! Good show. And tell me, Comrade Whistler – or, if I might, Comrade Norbert? Formality is an outmoded bourgeois mechanism, one feels. Doesn’t one? There’ll be no surnames after the revolution.”

  “By all means,” said Norbert, wondering how that would work, exactly: no surnames. It’d make telephone directories a bit tricky, surely?

  “There! Now, do you feel that the flange-mounters of the north-east are ready for revolution? As a class, one means.”

  Norbert chewed slowly on his scone, and made ruminative noises. When he felt that this device had carried him as far as it might, he cleared his throat. “Aye, well. Happen they are, and happen they aren’t. It all depends, I would say, on the objective nature of the circumstances prevailing and, naturally – and, if I may say so, subjectively – on the direction of the leadership.”

  Diana was clearly more than satisfied with this response, and hurried off to share it with the others. Once he was alone, Norbert produced a small, leather notebook from his jacket pocket.

  “Diana Lawrence,” he wrote. “Lady of refined type. In her seventh decade, but with the vigour of one in her fifth (and the costume, it might be noted, of one in her third). Introduced to me as ‘the celebrated travel writer’. Politically: enthusiastic, but not noticeably well-informed.”

  Diana’s place at his side was soon taken by Willie Browning, an extravagantly thin and modestly bearded man of considerable age. “I wonder,” he said, indicating their delightful surroundings, “what old Charlie would have made of all this.”

  “Charlie?”

  The old man chuckled. “That’s what we always called him in the old days. Karl Marx, I mean.” He looked away, towards the rolling green horizon, as if what he had said was nothing, merely a casual remark.

  Norbert did not have to counterfeit an impressed expression; over the years, he had shaken hands with many people who had shaken hands with many idols of working-class history – but, by any measure, this was a bit special. “You knew Karl Marx?”

  “Oh, my people knew him a bit – they moved in some of the same circles, you understand.”

  “What was he like?” Norbert knew it was a meaningless, cliched and unanswerable question, but felt it would have been almost rude not to ask it.

  “Old, by the time I met him. That’s my main memory of the great man – how very old he was. The beard and everything, you know?” He sighed. “Mind you, he wasn’t as old when he died as I am now, but in my youth he seemed very old to me.”

  Norbert smiled. He was trying to place the elderly Marxist’s accent; place it by region and hierarchy. Willie spoke with a little too much precision to be truly posh, and his vowels contained the faintest leftover of East Anglia. A collar-and-tie man, no doubt, schooled but never moneyed.

  “Very fond of the public house, Charlie was.” Norbert couldn’t be sure whether Willie’s tone was nostalgic or censorious. “A sociable fellow, if he took a liking to you. But he fell out with everyone sooner or later. Didn’t
have a friend left in the world by the time he died, not counting poor old Engels.”

  “He perhaps wouldn’t have been terribly surprised by what we see here, then,” said Norbert, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that his own accent would tell more about him than he might wish told, to the right listener.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean to say,” said Norbert, “it does appear to be something of a characteristic of working men’s movements – the setting up of new parties every few years.”

  “Ah.” The old man nodded. “Like prophet, like followers, you think? Yes, you could be onto something there, my young friend. And it can be quite painful, breaking from good comrades. But sometimes it has to be done.”

  “You speak from experience?”

  “I was with the Communist Party for a short while, but I’m afraid it was impossible for me to stay. Impossible.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yes, you see the local branch secretary – well, really, he didn’t have even the faintest grasp of revolutionary theory. Do you know, he put it to a branch meeting, in all seriousness, that the revolution might break out on a Sunday? A Sunday!”

  “A Sunday,” said Norbert. “I say.”

  “Well, quite! Revolutions do not happen at weekends. How can they? The men are not at work at weekends. If they are not at work, they do not constitute a proletariat, and only a proletariat can institute a proletarian revolution. By definition! Revolutions occur during the week.” He took out a small handkerchief and mopped his face. “Well obviously, I couldn’t stay after that.”

  “Obviously,” Norbert agreed. Despite a long association with the revolutionary movement, he was still astonished by the tininess of Willie’s ideological dispute with orthodoxy. Days of the week: that was pretty impressive, by anyone’s standards.

  “A plump man, the branch secretary,” said Willie. “Dreadful manners, very informal with the female comrades.”