Anything For a Quiet Life

by Michael Gilbert

  “Attend to it?”

  “Bust it up.”

  “Mob law. Can’t have that. What are they doing?”

  “They marched down to the council office and demanded to see the town clerk.”

  “Little Mr Timms. He’ll be scared stiff.”

  “He was. But he managed to get the front door shut and telephoned the police.”

  “So what are the crowd doing now?”

  “Milling round in the street and shouting. They’ll be breaking windows soon. Queen got in the back way; with two or three members of the Watch Committee he’d collected en route. They’re in the Council Chamber, in a state of siege.”

  They had reached the main street by now. It was jam-packed with people, and the blast of horns from blocked motorists was adding to the general pandemonium. Jonas had had some experience of mobs. He thought this one sounded angry, but not really dangerous yet. But the first broken window would fire the fuse. The leaders were milling round the main door. A big red-haired policeman stood stolidly outside it. A lot of the people were not really involved. They had come along to see the fun. Jonas and the Admiral pushed through them without much difficulty and reached the front of the building. Positioning himself on the top step, the Admiral bellowed in his quarterdeck voice, “Listen to me a moment. Stop shouting and listen.”

  Jonas thought he was the only person who could have made them listen. The hubbub died down a bit.

  “There’s no point in trying to fight the police or break down the door. What you need is a deputation. You’ve got a grievance. Right. They’ll have to listen to you. Half a dozen of you.”

  “Preston and Collinson,” suggested Jonas quickly. They both happened to be his clients.

  “And Mrs Garibaldi,” said the Admiral. “You’ll come? Right. We need three more volunteers.”

  The idea of a deputation was gaining ground. The Admiral said to the policeman, “Let this lot in, Davey, quick, then shut the door behind us.”

  They found Queen in the front hall with two more policemen. The Admiral explained his plan. Queen said, “Good idea. I’ll take you all up.”

  In the Council Chamber three members of the Watch Committee were forming a protective phalanx round poor Mr Timms, who looked as though he was about to burst into tears.

  “Why don’t we all sit down,” said Queen, “then we can talk things out.”

  The Admiral said, “I hope one thing’s clear. We can’t have violence. It won’t do you any sort of good.”

  “It won’t do them circus bastards any good either,” said Mr Baker, a large and aggressive engineer. But it seemed that he was in a minority. Tempers were cooling.

  “What we’ve got to do,” said Queen, “is get the fullest and most accurate description of the things that have been taken. Mr Timms will write it all down. Suppose you start, Mrs Garibaldi.”

  Mrs Garibaldi had lost a silver teapot, which had been given to her by her late husband on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their wedding and a pair of small silver candlesticks. She described them in loving detail. Her next-door neighbour, Mrs Preston, had lost two athletic cups won by her son at school. None of the losses seemed very serious but Jonas knew exactly how the people felt about them. It was not the value of the goods, but the fact of the intrusion. To have alien fingers dabbling among their private possessions was a form of rape.

  When the list was complete the Superintendent said, “You’ve most of you been to the funfair and you’ve seen the people who run it and I expect you’d recognise them if you saw them again. Now think hard. Did you see any of them near your houses yesterday afternoon?”

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  “It’s like this,” said Mrs Preston. “As soon as the sun came out we all went down to the town to do our weekend shopping and the kids made straight for the beach.”

  “Most of the afternoon,” agreed Mrs Garibaldi, “I don’t suppose there wasn’t anyone around in the estate at all.”

  “Did any of you meet anyone on the road, going out or coming back?”

  Heads were shaken again.

  “You see how difficult that makes it for us. But what we can do and will do, is to circulate the descriptions you’ve given us as widely as possible. The teapot and the cups had engraving on them. They won’t be easy to pass . . .”

  There was more discussion, but the steam was out of the meeting. Looking out of the window at the end of the hall Jonas could see that most of the crowd had drifted away, and the police had the traffic moving again.

  Jonas congratulated Queen on his handling of the affair.

  Queen said, “I did think it was going to be nasty, but they’re reasonable folk really. Incidentally, I’ve got on to that stall-keeper. His name’s Golding. He’s got a wife who’s as big a brute as he is by all account. And has got a bit of form.”

  “Theft?”

  “Assault with intent to injure. He nearly killed a man in a pub at Sidmouth. Some argument about money. He collected three months for that, and would have got more, only it was partly the other man’s fault.”

  “I knew he was an ugly customer,” said the Admiral, who had been listening to this.

  The twins, who had been watching the Admiral’s house, had seen him leave when he went to visit Jonas. They waited for a few minutes and then made their way round to the back, found the door key under the tile and entered quickly. They knew that Mrs Matcham had the day off on Saturday.

  “No hurry,” said Colin, “we’ve bags of time.”

  David said, “It’s all right if he does come back. He said we could come here whenever we wanted, didn’t he?”

  Colin looked at his twin thoughtfully. Then he said, “Yes, that’s right. Let’s go in.”

  They made their way upstairs. When not in use the telescope lived in a cupboard in the attic. They took it out, carried it on to the flat roof and fixed it on the permanent housing which stood there.

  “Be jolly careful,” said Colin. “If you look at the sun through it, it could blind you.”

  “Stale,” said David.

  They positioned the telescope so that it was focused on the funfair. Then they fetched two stools from the attic, sat down behind the telescope and took it in turns to watch. The one who wasn’t watching had a notebook and a pencil.

  Colin said, “If he comes back, remember that we’re birdwatching. Write some birds’ names in the book.”

  “What birds?”

  “Any birds,” said Colin impatiently, and resumed his inspection of the funfair. He was concentrating on the side where the stallholders’ caravans were parked and their families lived.

  If the Admiral had been watching them he would have seen no reason to doubt their toughness and initiative. He might have qualified his thoughts about their innocence.

  Half an hour later David said, “Got it. It’s the blue one, quite a bit separate from the others. It’s got a box of geraniums on the window ledge.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Certain. I saw him go in and come out again. And his wife came out. That’s the one all right.”

  Colin said “Good.” They packed up the telescope, put it back in the cupboard, returned the stools to the attic, and departed as unobtrusively as they had come.

  That afternoon, having nothing better to do, the Admiral again made his way down to the fairground to see if he could pick up anything which might help the wobblers on the council to make up their minds. Nine-tenths of the way there, he thought. One more good push.

  Being Saturday, the place was crowded and there was a small queue filtering through the entrance. Immediately in front of him was a girl pushing a pram with a baby in it. Rather a slatternly-looking girl with a lot of make-up on her face. The baby was invisible under a pile of bedclothes. Poor mite must be suffocating, thought the Admiral, and wondered if he should say something about it, but decided that a mother, even as young as that one, probably knew what was best for her own baby.

  There wer
e quite a few policemen about, he noticed. The stallholders looked a bit edgy, but the crowd seemed reasonably good-tempered. Golding was busy at his roll-a-disc stall which had the usual crowd round it. The Admiral watched for a bit and thought that he seemed more generous in his paying-out than he had been before. Maybe he had sensed the hostility of his customers. A clever brute, thought the Admiral. In a long and active life he had met many brutes, but few of them had been clever.

  A woman arrived, pushing her way through the crowd round the stall, carrying a thermos of some hot drink. She ducked under the board and took charge of the game whilst her husband refreshed himself. A big woman, with a rasping voice, she had no difficulty in keeping the game going. A fitting mate for the brute, thought the Admiral.

  It was at that moment that he had a shock. He happened to be looking back at his own house, clearly in sight, perched halfway up the cliff. And as he was looking he saw a flash of light. Someone on the roof was using a mirror, slanting it into the strong sun and then turning it away again. A primitive but effective form of heliograph. The message was clear too. The Admiral had not forgotten his Morse code.

  “Okay,” said the mirror and then again, “okay – okay – okay.”

  “What on earth,” said the Admiral. “This wants looking into.”

  He made quickly for the exit. It took him some time to get through the crowd which was coming in. The stout man in the singlet (surely it was Mr Bailey) recognised him and waved to him genially.

  “Going already, Admiral,” he said. “Not spent all your money, have you?”

  “Not quite,” said the Admiral shortly. He noticed another dissatisfied customer just ahead of him. The girl with the pram was leaving too.

  Back at his house the mystery deepened. The key was under the tile. There was no sign of breaking in. There was no sort of disturbance and if someone had been up on the roof they had left no mark. The telescope, which was one of the most valuable things in the house, was safely stowed in the attic cupboard. The Admiral made his way down through the house, checking as he went. His orderly habits enabled him to say, with certainty, that nothing was missing.

  Could the whole thing have been his imagination?

  He was prepared to believe that a flash of sunlight might have deceived him but regular flashes spelling out a message? Was he becoming like one of those people who saw unidentified flying objects? There had been a story in the papers about a market-gardener at Wrexham who had not only seen one, hovering above his garden, but had read a message, flashed from one of its portholes. Oddly enough that had been in Morse code too.

  The Admiral shook his head angrily. He might be over eighty, but he wasn’t cracked. Not yet. Anyway, there was nothing to be done about it. The police had plenty on their hands. He could hardly bother them with a non-burglary.

  It was twelve o’clock on the following day and the Admiral, who had been attending morning service at St Michael’s Church, was surprised to find a police car outside his gate. It was Superintendent Queen, and he looked happy.

  “We’ve nicked ’em,” he said. “Had a tip-off on the telephone yesterday afternoon. Went round and found all the stuff stolen from the estate, in a sack, hidden under that man Golding’s caravan. The owners have identified every bit of it. We’ve had an emergency meeting of the Watch Committee. No opposition this time. A unanimous recommendation. No licence for Mr Bailey next year. I fancy we’ve seen the last of him.”

  “What did Golding say about it?”

  “Said it was a frame-up, naturally. But couldn’t suggest who did the framing. It’ll take more than a bit of fast talking to get him out of this one.”

  “Excellent,” said the Admiral. A suspicion of the truth was forming in his mind. Too faint as yet to make consecutive sense. Certainly too faint to be expressed to the Superintendent.

  As he consumed his solitary Sunday luncheon the picture sharpened and gained definition. Small items were added to other small items, until what had started as suspicion approached certainty.

  He was clearing away the dishes when there was a knock on the door. It was the two boys.

  Colin, taking the lead as usual, said, “We’ve come to say goodbye. Our holiday’s over. We’ve been ordered to go back and cheer up Dad.”

  “I’m sure you will,” said the Admiral.

  “It’s been a super holiday,” said David. “We’ll be coming back next year, I hope.”

  “One thing you won’t find here, I’m certain, is Bailey’s Circus.”

  The boys looked at each other. The faintest flicker of a smile crossed David’s face. Colin was impassive.

  The Admiral said, “And when did you learn the Morse code?”

  There was a moment of complete silence. Then both boys burst out laughing.

  David said, “I told you he’d cotton on to it.” And to the Admiral, “How did you spot it? Were you able to read the flashes?”

  “I’ve been reading Morse code since I was a midshipman. Was it you with the pram?”

  “It was,” said David, “and I nearly had a fit when I saw you behind me in the queue. I was glad we’d put the make-up on pretty thick.”

  “And in the pram, I take it, you had the stuff you’d lifted from Mrs Garibaldi and the others.”

  “That bit wasn’t much fun,” said Colin. “We knew the houses were empty, because we knew who lived in them and we’d seen them go out. But all the time we were thinking, suppose someone’s been left behind. There was actually a dog in one, but luckily it was one we’d made friends with.”

  “I was scared stiff,” said David. “We just nipped in, picked up the first things we could lay our hands on and nipped out again.”

  “I see,” said the Admiral. The boys looked at him anxiously.

  “And the second part of your plan, which you also carried out successfully, was to leave the stuff under Golding’s caravan.”

  “That bit was easy. It was right away in a corner by itself. We’d spotted it with your telescope.”

  “And you gave us the whole idea,” said Colin. “That Dutch skipper’s wife and the baby.”

  “So I’m responsible, am I?” said the Admiral.

  They guessed from his tone of voice that he wasn’t going to make trouble and smiled at him engagingly.

  He said to David, “I’d no idea you were such an accomplished performer.

  “Oh, he’s a first-class actress,” said Colin.

  After they had gone, something in the tone of the last remark lingered in the Admiral’s mind and stirred a memory. He pulled down his copy of Who’s Who and turned to the entry under ‘Bourdon, Sir David’.

  First there was a summarised account of his career in the Royal Navy. Then, in the terse shorthand of that compilation: “M 1960 Félicité, née St Honorée (killed in air crash 1983). Two children: one s, one d.”

  “I suppose I should have guessed,” said the Admiral as he shut up the heavy scarlet volume. He wondered if he should tell Jonas the end of the story. He would very much have liked to do so, but decided against it. Jonas was a solicitor, and might have some compunction about a brute going to prison for something he hadn’t done.

  The Admiral had none at all.

  6

  We’ve Come to Report a Murder, Sir

  “For the last few months,” said Dan Cullingford, “I’ve been wondering about myself. And when you start wondering about yourself that keeps you awake at night and when you don’t sleep properly that makes you feel worse than ever.”

  “A great deal of illness is psychosomatic,” agreed Jonas. “You look fit enough.” His visitor had clear blue eyes and the face, more red than brown, of a man who lived much of his life in the open air.

  “I’ve no reason not to be. I still take a lot of exercise. Now that I’ve only got the one full-time assistant we have to share the games between us. On Wednesday I played an hour of football with the boys and felt perfectly all right whilst I was doing it. It was when I sat down afterwards that I bega
n to wonder.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m the wrong side of fifty.”

  Jonas, who was the wrong side of sixty, thought of saying that he took a minimum of exercise and managed to get along all right, but realised that this would be little consolation to Dan Cullingford. Instead he said, “I suppose you’ve had a proper check-up?”

  “I saw Dr Brassie yesterday.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The sort of thing doctors always say when they don’t really know the answer. He said he thought it was possible I had what he called a tired heart. For a real check-up I should have to go into hospital for a day or two.”

  “He said that, did he?” said Jonas thoughtfully. He knew that Dr Brassie was not an alarmist. “What did you say?”

  “That I might be able to manage it at the end of term. That’s only eight weeks away. However, I didn’t really come to talk about my health. That was only incidental. I wanted you to advise me about remaking my will.”

  “There’s an existing will, then?”

  “I’ve brought it along.” He fished a legal-looking envelope out of his pocket. “I made it when I got married. Hadn’t bothered until then.”

  Jonas looked first at the envelope. It had the name Porter and Merriman on it. Cullingford saw him looking at it and said, “It was Ambrose Porter who did it for me. After he died I never had anything more to do with the firm. I mean—it’s all right to come to you, isn’t it?”

  Jonas, who like all solicitors, was cautious about appropriating clients from other firms said, “Yes, of course. If Ambrose Porter was the one you really went to and you haven’t consulted them for ten years.”