Anything For a Quiet Life

by Michael Gilbert

  Jonas understood perfectly. They would ask him where Rowe had hidden his caravan. And he would tell them. No doubt about that. Then one of them would go off to find out if he had told them the truth. If he had, they would let him go. Or would they? He rather doubted it. If they intended to let him go, would they have allowed him to see their faces, listen to them talk, note the number of their car? Jonas was surprised to find that he could weigh up the potentialities of the situation as if it was a legal problem which concerned one of his clients.

  By now they had reached the area of small streets between the church and the market. When they swung round to the right, Jonas knew that they had taken the wrong turning. That road was a dead-end, running up to the churchyard wall. There were two women standing on the pavement talking.

  The driver said, “We’ll have to go back.”

  “No trouble,” said the big man genially. He dipped one hand into his pocket, took out a gun and pushed the muzzle into Jonas’s side so hard that it made him gasp. He said, “You do anything stupid, and I’ll pull the trigger. It won’t stop us from getting away, but you won’t have any stomach left. Think about it.”

  Jonas said, “I’m not stupid.”

  “Stay that way.”

  The driver had got the car reversed. The two women watched the manoeuvre incuriously. They drove off slowly, turned out of the street, and headed down a road which, as Jonas knew, would bring them out near the marketplace.

  Market day, too, thought Jonas. They’ll run into trouble there, for sure.

  The trouble came as they turned the corner. It was a herd of bullocks, driven by a farmer with a red face. He had been in trouble already with the motorists, whose cars were blocking the end of the street. The bullocks were filtering through this barricade, using the pavement on both sides of the cars. One of the bullocks on the offside pavement had just avoided treading on a baby chair. The woman who owned it was telling the farmer, in pungent Sussex, what she thought of him and his bullocks. A sympathetic claque of bystanders were supporting her. One of the cars in the block ahead had started to move. The driver of Jonas’s car turned down the window and said to the farmer, “Shift those bloody cows over, can’t you?”

  There was no hope of backing. A van and a car were already blocking the road behind him. But he had seen that, as the rearmost of the cars in front moved, he could squeeze past the other two by using the nearside pavement.

  The farmer, attacked from a new point, swung round and told the driver what he could do to himself. The driver ignored him. He had already started to edge forward. The gap in front of him was widening.

  A bullock swerved across his bow. He sounded a blast on his horn.

  This was a bad mistake. A frisky Southdown bullock can take just so much and no more. It reared up on to its hind legs, performed a skittering dance, came down alongside the car, and pushed its head through the open window. The big man half-rose in his seat.

  Jonas felt the pistol shift away. His left hand was already on the door catch. He tugged the door open and rolled out into the gutter.

  By this time there was a crowd on both pavements. Two men helped Jonas to his feet. When he looked round, the car had gone, squeezing past the block in front.

  “Well,” said one of the men. “That’s a nice way to treat you. They might have stopped to see if you’d hurt yourself.”

  “I think they were in too much of a hurry to stop,” said Jonas. “Thank you. I’m quite all right now.”

  A woman said, “Your trousers are going to need a bit of cleaning.”

  Jonas wasn’t worried about his suit. He was glad that he still possessed a stomach. When he got back to the office he found Sam, angry at having been sent on a pointless errand. “There wasn’t no parcel,” he said, “and what have you been doing to yourself?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Jonas. “I’ll tell you when I’ve had a bath and changed.”

  As he was coming downstairs the front door bell rang. To Jonas’s relief Sam was there to answer it. He had had enough of strange callers.

  The newcomer was middle-aged and tubby. He looked as if he might have been an army man. He said, “My name’s Calder. I left my card with your secretary. Do you think we could have a word?”

  “Yes,” said Jonas. As they went into his office he breathed to Sam, “Stay handy.” He was past taking chances.

  Mr Calder looked appreciatively round the room before settling himself down in the visitor’s chair. He said, “There was a nasty smash out on the Portsmouth Road just now. It’ll be on the evening news, I expect.”

  Jonas stared at him.

  “The car ran into a roadblock. Ran into it quite literally, I mean. Tried to crash through it. Silly thing to do. Went out of control, hit a telegraph pole and caught fire. Two men in it, both dead. I’m sorry about that.”

  “If it’s the men I’m thinking about,” said Jonas, “I’m not in the least sorry they’re dead.”

  “I suppose that’s understandable,” said Mr Calder. “But we were sorry about it. We’d have liked at least one of them more or less undamaged. We had some questions we wanted to ask him.”

  Jonas was not sure whether his visitor’s matter-of-fact manner was comforting or alarming. He said, “I suppose we’re talking about the same car. The one I got out of.”

  “Correct. Actually I’m not quite clear how you did get out of it. I gather there was a bit of a fracas.”

  “A bullock put his head through the window.”

  “Very disconcerting,” said Mr Calder, and started to laugh. He suddenly looked much more human. He said, “We owe you an explanation. If I tell you some of the background, you’ll realise what it was all about. Dick Rowe’s an Ulsterman, but his mother was American, and he lived for some time in the States. When his mother and father died he and his brother came back.”

  “He said he hadn’t got a brother.”

  “That’s right. His brother was shot by the IRA. That’s when Dick came to work for us. He posed as an American sympathiser. Helped with running arms and explosives. Got into their confidence. It was information from him that led to the arrest of the people responsible for the last two bomb explosions in London. Very dangerous job. Of course they got on to him in the end, and we had to pull him out.”

  Jonas thought about his client. He said, “He did look a bit impassive. Was that plastic surgery?”

  “That’s right. New face, new identity. We fixed him up with a job in the States. A partnership in a veterinary practice.”

  “He’d be good at that,” said Jonas.

  “The trouble is that arrangements like that take time. We have to work through our friends on the other side. Reciprocal assistance. Meanwhile we had to put Dick on ice. He was target number one for the opposition. We thought the best plan was to supply him with a caravan and let him spend the summer here. We chose Shackleton because it looked nice and peaceful.”

  “That’s why I chose it,” said Jonas.

  “On the off-chance that Dick might need help we alerted your senior policeman, Chief Superintendent Whaley, to the position. I needn’t tell you that he was meant to keep it totally under his hat. But he had to go and tell someone else. In strict confidence, of course. And someone else told someone else.”

  “The only time I met our Chief Superintendent he didn’t strike me as a very discreet sort of person.”

  “My own boss,” said Mr Calder dispassionately, “who is also Dick’s bank manager, has expressed the opinion that Whaley ought to be first skinned and then filleted. He not only talked. He tried to put a police guard on Dick. Thus pointing him out plainly to the opposition.”

  “That was why he pulled out of the caravan park.”

  “He not only pulled out. He sent for us. We’ve got quite a large team down here at this moment.”

  “Large enough to organise a few roadblocks.”

  “Oh, quite,” said Mr Calder with a smile. “I was glad you weren’t in the car when it happened
. You’d been bothered enough already.”

  This seemed to Jonas to be an understatement. He said, “I suppose when they burgled my office they were looking for information about Rowe. They thought there might be an address in his will. Which reminds me. I suppose Rowe isn’t his real name.”

  “No. Do you think that might invalidate his will?”

  “I suppose it might.”

  “I could give you his real name.”

  “No,” said Jonas firmly. “When he gets to America he can make a new will. And use an American lawyer. I wish him well, but I don’t want to know anything more about him.”

  Claire opened the door, said, “Sorry. I didn’t know you had a visitor. But it was a bit urgent.”

  “It’s all right,” said Mr Calder. “I’m just going.”

  “What is it now?” said Jonas resignedly.

  “We’ve got a new client. A Mrs Lovibond. She’s waiting outside. She wants to consult you about something.”

  “Certainly.”

  “The thing is, there may be a bit of trouble about this. She’s one of Chris Clover’s star clients.”

  “Then why is she coming to me?”

  “I gather she saw you roll out of a car, and felt sorry for you.”

  2

  Black Bob

  The moon was throwing a cold clear light over the field. It was called the Top Field, because it was the northernmost of the seven which made up Maggs’s Farm, and stood a little higher than the other six. Under the hedge which bordered its upper end something was moving, slipping in and out of the shadows. It might have been an animal but, when it appeared for a moment in the full moonlight, it could be seen to be a boy.

  Tommo was a young tearaway who lived with his mother in a farmhouse two miles up the road. She had long given up any attempt to control him, and her neighbours all prophesied that he would come to a bad end. What he was doing, at three o’clock on that particular morning, was setting snares for rabbits. They holed up under the bank among the roots of the thorn bushes and would start coming out at first light. Tommo reckoned to pick up three or four. Later in the day he would offer them for sale to their rightful owner, Farmer Maggs.

  He was not the only occupant of the Top Field.

  A dark cloud was drifting along the upper edge of the pasture; moving, stopping and moving on again. This was Black Bob, Farmer Maggs’s most valued possession. He was a splendid animal, not grossly overbred like some of the bulls which won rosettes at the Smithfield Show (‘Can’t hardly carry their own weight,’ said Maggs. ‘They have to wheel ‘em up to the cows on a trolley.’). Black Bob was one of the smaller, lighter, Southdown strain, but was still a formidable hunk of muscle and aggression, moving over the grass with the ponderous certainty of a Sherman tank.

  Tommo watched him without fear. Black Bob would never charge into a thorn hedge, and if he did make any such move, Tommo could wriggle through the close-growing roots as easily as the rabbits he was trapping.

  Black Bob knew that he was there, a trespasser in his private kingdom. But he knew that he was unassailable. He gave a brief snort to mark his feelings and moved off down the field.

  Tommo had scooped out a little hole in the dust at the foot of the bank. He was a great deal more comfortable there than he would have been in the sordid heap of rags in his mother’s back kitchen. As soon as it was light he would see what luck his snares had brought him, and would move down with his catch towards the farmhouse. He liked to wait until Maggs had left on his morning round, when he could deal with Mrs Maggs, who was more generous and less suspicious than her husband.

  On this particular morning he had not long to wait. He saw Maggs come out, not dressed for farm work, but wearing a dark suit and carrying a bulging leather case. Tommo was not to know it, but he was on his way to Shackleton, to call on his solicitor, Jonas Pickett. It was a visit which was to have consequences for all of them.

  “Well, Mr Maggs,” said Jonas. “It’s not a simple question. Not by any means.”

  The contents of the leather case were spread on his desk. Some of them were modern documents, neatly typed and bundled together with tape. Others were huge old-fashioned deeds, handwritten on parchment.

  “When I bought the farm,” said Maggs, “the lawyer from Hoole, old Michelmore, he was the one who looked after our family business, but he’s dead now, he said, ‘No need to keep any deeds that’s more than thirty years old, you can use ’em for lampshades if you like.’ But Mrs Maggs, she wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Jonas. “I think it’s a crime to destroy old deeds.”

  “That’s what Mr Westall said. He said, tear them up and you’re tearing up the history of the county. I let him have the old deeds to look at. Truth to say, he kept them so long I thought he’d forgotten all about ‘em, but when he came back, he was in a real taking, I can tell you.”

  Jonas knew of Mr Westall, although he had never met him. He was one of two acknowledged local antiquarians. He had written a treatise on historic and prehistoric Shackleton. Jonas had borrowed it from the vicar, and found it a curious work, being partly based on genuine research among the local archives, and partly designed as an attack on the theories of his rival in this field, Professor Templeman from Sussex University.

  “When he brought the deeds back he had a big book with him, some sort of local history.”

  “Clayborne’s History of West Sussex,” suggested Jonas. “I’ve got a copy here.” He fetched down the fat red and gold book from the bookshelf.

  “That’s the one,” said Maggs. “That’s the very book. He read me some things out of it, all about King Henry the Eighth it was. From what he told me, he wasn’t the sort of joker we learnt about at school.”

  “Bluff King Hal? He was a lecher and a bully.”

  “That’s right. And it wasn’t just his nine wives. I expect they got no more than they deserved. It was what he did to all those monasteries. Did you know there used to be one a few miles north of here? You’ll not see one stone standing on another now.”

  Jonas had found the place in the book. He read out:

  “‘In 1520 the Bernadine Cistercian Abbey of Fyneshade was visited by the King’s Commissioners. The Abbot, Robert Beaufrere, had been warned of their coming and before their arrival had caused all the ornaments to be removed from the chapel and the Abbey building and buried. They had been replaced by common artefacts of wood and iron.’”

  “That’s right,” said Maggs. “That’s what he told me. The King had the abbot and his—what was he called?”

  “His sacristan.”

  “Right. He had the pair of them taken up to London and put in the Tower, and they tried to make them tell where all these treasures had been put. But no matter what they did to them, and they really worked them over, they couldn’t make them talk.”

  “That’s right. They both died under torture rather than tell where the abbey treasure was hidden. The abbot was a strong man. There’s a lot about him here.” Jonas was turning the pages of Clayborne. “We don’t know much about the sacristan. All we’re told is that his name was Legrand.”

  “Ah,” said Maggs. “But that was the point. That’s what old Westall was going on about. It’s what he’d found in my deeds. They don’t go right back to those times, of course, but it seems that one deed tells you what was in an earlier one. You’d understand about that, sir.”

  “Recitals, yes. Go on.”

  “Well, it seems the farm belonged since way back to a family called Lengard, and he made out that this was really the same as Legrand. It was just that people weren’t so fussy about spelling in those days.”

  “It’s a possible variation,” said Jonas. He was beginning to see what Mr Westall was getting excited about. “And your farm’s not far from the site of the abbey.”

  “Little more’n a mile across the fields.”

  “And if the farmer, in 1520, was a relative of the sacristan, his farm would be the logical place
for them to bury the abbey treasure. Yes, I see. It’s plausible. And Mr Westall wants to wander over your property with a metal detector and see if he can turn anything up?”

  “That’s right, sir. First thing I thought was, why not? Won’t do no harm. He’d have to be a bit careful in the Top Field. I’ve kept Black Bob in there ever since he upset that picnic party. Well, you know about that.”

  It had been the first occasion on which Maggs had consulted him. A family, with little knowledge of country ways, had thought they could share one of the lower fields with the bull. Luckily they had got out over the fence unhurt, and Black Bob had contented himself with trampling on a transistor and other belongings which they had scattered around, and had finished by sitting down on their picnic basket. They had wanted compensation. Jonas had told Maggs to ignore them. “They were trespassers. They’ve got no rights. They won’t sue you.”

  This had proved to be an accurate prediction.

  “Howsomever,” said Maggs, “my wife wasn’t so sure about this metal detector. She said, ‘You go and have a word with Mr Pickett. He was right about the picnickers. He’ll tell you what to do.’”

  “Well,” said Jonas, “as I said, it’s not a simple question.” He referred to some notes which his partner, Sabrina Mountjoy, had made for him. He referred all difficult legal points to her and very rarely found her wrong. “Things are classed by the law as treasure trove, if they were obviously hidden with the object of recovering them later, if the owner can’t now be traced, and if they turn out to be gold or silver.”

  “Not much doubt is there? This’d be treasure trove all right, or most of it.”

  “Quite so. And that’s where the snag comes in. If they are treasure trove they belong to the finder. It’s only if they aren’t treasure trove that they belong to the owner of the land.”

  Maggs said “Ah,” and then “Oh.” His mind was moving over the new possibilities. “So if they turned out to be diamonds or rubies or such, they wouldn’t be treasure trove, and I’d get them. But if, what’s more likely, they were gold and silver, old man Westall would collar the lot.”