Doris blew her nose violently again, sending tidal ripples over the surface of the brown Windsor.
‘It’s called clinging to the wreckage,’ said Davies.
‘Both of you,’ said Jemma. They were in The Babe In Arms awaiting Mod.
‘I suppose so. It’s ridiculous, I know, but we’ve been going along like this for years. In the same house. She’s been there and I’ve been there and we’ve hardly exchanged a civil word. But it didn’t seem to be so difficult or embarrassing.’ He looked at her deep eyes regarding him soberly. ‘But it’s you. That’s the difference.’
Jemma put her fingers on the hand folded around his beer. ‘Dangerous,’ she said with great seriousness. ‘There’s no way we could ever get together; I mean marry.’ She appeared unusually embarrassed. ‘Even if you asked. I could never take you to Martinique.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you could,’ mumbled Davies as if the matter had preoccupied him over a long period. ‘Not Martinique.’
Mod appeared, a wide cheery smile topping his overcoat collar. ‘You won, did you?’ said Davies, rising to get a round of drinks. The bar was only a yard distant. ‘There’s no danger then of you personally diminishing the unemployment figures.’
‘None at all,’ said Mod with satisfaction. ‘And as from now I am not merely unemployed, I am unemployable.’ From beneath his overcoat he produced a bunch of stapled papers. ‘My file,’ he said with some pride. ‘I went back after the interview to tell the senior official something in mitigation of my circumstances. I was almost in the street when I remembered it. So I returned to the interview room and it was empty. The chap and his clerk had gone. And my file was on the table.’
‘What you are about to confess is criminal,’ said Davies, bringing the drinks to the table.
‘It’s my file,’ pointed out Mod.
‘I don’t want to hear another word about it,’ Davies warned, sitting down. ‘And I didn’t hear the words you just said.’
Mod sat quietly: ‘I had to wait for about half an hour in another office.’
‘What did you nick from there, the Queen’s national insurance card?’
‘No, this,’ said Mod, burrowing in his pocket. ‘They had telephone directories for every part of the country. So I amused myself looking for Prenderleys in the Essex directory. Like the policeman in Chelmsford told you, there’s only a single group of them, all living in Southend. Apart from Old Tommy at Purwell.’ He found the piece of paper. ‘There,’ he said, handing it to Davies. ‘There’s four of them on the phone.’
Davies took the list. ‘I’ve been warned off,’ he muttered. ‘I had a nasty few minutes with the super today and he’s not all that pleased with me. Trespassing on another manor. It’s got to be referred higher. I may get the heave-ho.’ He smiled at Jemma. ‘I may leave the country. Go to live in Martinique or somewhere.’
Jemma said: ‘We’ve got a choral society outing to Southend next week.’
They sang all the way from Kensal Rise, the coach itself seeming to roll and roar in harmony. Davies, who knew none of the words and few of the tunes, sat next to Jemma against the window, mouthing haplessly and with increasingly weary lips. Jemma had told only Mr Swingler, the conductor of the choir, of Davies’s real mission, and then in considerably altered details. As far as the other members of the society were concerned, he was a visiting tenor from Wales who sang only in Welsh. Davies made mouth movements and emitted occasional pseudo-Welsh sounds while looking resolutely out of the window at the passing suburbs and eventually the brief grey-green rural approach to Southend-on-Sea.
It was a poor day for visiting the seaside. Windy drizzle blew against the coach windows. People crouched along pavements, hoping for something better. It mattered little to Davies, nor did the oddness of his situation, the impossibility of matching the singing nor the increasing tiredness of lips and gums. None of it mattered because Mavis Prenderley, late nanny of Cape House, Frinton, and inmate of Chelmsford Women’s Prison, was alive and well and he was going to see her.
The coach reached the domed hall where the choir festival was taking place. Canvas banners strung across the outside strained like sails in the wind coming from the muddy sea. The members of the choral society came off the coach like disembarking footballers, flexing their limbs, making sharp forays along the promenade while gulping in lungfuls of brined air; sounding off scales and snatches of cantata.
‘Wait until they’re all inside the hall,’ whispered Jemma, ‘and then make a dash for it. Get back by six or you’ll be left behind.’
They followed the other choristers into the building. The main lighting had not been switched on and the singers moved about like shadows, complaining about flying dust and testing the acoustics by singing out from the stage to colleagues placed in strategic parts of the auditorium. Everyone appeared to be occupied. Jemma rolled her eyes to Davies to make for the door.
At an elated crouch he went from the hall into the grey afternoon. Byron Street where Mavis Prenderley lived was only ten minutes’ walk; he would not even have to get a taxi. In the slack season seaside taxi drivers were inclined to be nosy and observant.
He had his collar pulled up, for both shelter and concealment, but he strode purposefully like a man with nothing to hide. A policeman came around a corner, one of those apparently aimless wandering constables who appear for no reasonable reason at inconvenient moments. Davies stopped himself crossing to the other side of the street and, burying his face deeper into the cleft of his collar, he slightly less blatantly strode on. The policeman paused and, to Davies’s relief, studied the contents of a second-hand shop window.
Byron Street was terraced houses, small and old but with optimistically painted doors, clean curtains and plant pots in the windows. At number forty-three he paused, lowered his collar, and knocked. She answered so immediately that he thought she might have been waiting inside the door. He must have studied, stared at her, because she gave an elderly blush. ‘Mr Thompson?’ she said. ‘Come in. Don’t stand in the street.’
Already committed to the lie, Davies mumbled his thanks and ducked below the threshold. The door gave straight into the room, a crowded, tight, old-fashioned parlour, with covers on the backs and the arms of the two red chairs, a big ticking clock in between two petrified dogs on the mantelshelf, droplets of glass hanging around the light bulb and damask curtains suspended within the modest nets at the window. There was a decorative square of carpet, balding in places, and a heavy dark table and four chairs. Over the fireplace, above a gas fire which, judging by its sputtering, had just been lit, was a picture of a wild mountain scene and beside it a framed photograph of a small and grinning young man. He tried not to stare too closely at it. Was it? Was it Lofty Brock? He swallowed so hard the old lady heard him.
‘Sorry,’ he said lamely. ‘I suppose that’s what comes of hurrying down the street.’ Almost as a diversion, he held out his hand. ‘Harry Thompson, Premier Insurance Company,’ he said. ‘It is very good of you to spare the time to see me, Miss Prenderley.’
‘Time?’ she answered. ‘Time’s nothing. I’ve got plenty of time. You find you do when you get older.’ She motioned him to sit at the table. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘George Prenderley came round to tell me you had phoned. That side of the family haven’t said a dicky-bird to me for years. I suppose when they heard it was insurance they thought there might be something in it for them.’
She went into a kitchen and Davies heard her filling the kettle and lighting the gas. He got up and squinted closely at the mantelshelf photograph. ‘It was the only way we could do it,’ he called out to her. ‘We knew you lived somewhere in the Southend district so I had my assistant call all the Prenderleys in this area.’
‘We’re all here,’ she called back. ‘All in a couple of miles of each other. But we’re not much of a family. Hardly anybody talks to anybody else. There’s only Tom, my brother, who lives away, and that’s only at Purwell. I suppose he’s
still alive. When they die is the only time you get any news of them.’
She returned with the tea on a tray with a teapot in the shape of a cottage and the words ‘A present from Clacton’ on the side. ‘It’s a bit of excitement anyway,’ she said, putting a small embroidered cloth on the table and placing the tray on that. ‘You coming here. I don’t get many strangers. When they do come they either want to buy my old furniture and bits for next to nothing, or they’re people gassing on about God.’ She poured the tea. Davies pointed to the photograph on the mantelshelf.
‘Who is that gentleman?’ he asked as casually as he could.
‘Billy,’ she said. ‘Billy Dobson. He died in the War. At least he was never found. He was …’
She stopped and looked into his face. ‘It’s not about Billy is it? He’s not turned up?’ The teapot was frozen in her hand. ‘I always thought he would.’
‘What makes you say that?’ asked Davies carefully.
‘Billy? He could wriggle out of a milk tin.’
‘He actually did,’ said Davies.
Her puffy face paled. ‘I knew he would,’ she whispered angrily. ‘I knew the bugger would.’ Her expression hardened. ‘So he wasn’t dead,’ she muttered. ‘But he never got in touch.’
‘Tell me about Billy,’ said Davies. ‘Would you mind?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she told him slowly. Her eyes showed that she was thinking of long ago. ‘Why should I?’ Davies thought how odd it was that she had not asked him why he was there, what his business was; it was as if she had been waiting for years to tell him. Her voice was slow but there was a change taking place in her eyes. ‘A holy terror if ever there was,’ she said with a suspicion of eagerness. ‘All the girls loved him. But I was the only one he wanted to marry and I turned him down.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Too short,’ she said emphatically. ‘For one thing. For another, the way he lived was not very steady. Burglary. You’d never know when, or if, he was coming home. That’s what I said to myself. Billy had been through the windows of half the big houses in Essex, and outside. He was reckoned to have got into Sandringham, you know, where the King lived. And the King was in at the time. Edward the Eighth, the one that resigned.’
‘He had aspirations?’ said Davies, adding: ‘Billy.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ she replied, still almost dreamily. ‘He liked a better class of thieving. He always worked the same. He’d get to know one of the girl servants. He was only dinky, as I say, but he knew how to get around girls. With his wicked eyes and his bright little teeth, full of jokes and flattering nineteen to the dozen. Off he’d take them for the day at Clacton, on the roundabouts and side-shows, walk along the front, fish and chips on the bus coming back, and that was that. He could sing too. They’d do anything he’d ask them. I know, I was one who did. The next thing you know, you’d be leaving a window open for him.’ Abruptly, she came out of the reverie. ‘I’m telling you all this,’ she said guiltily, ‘and I don’t know why. What’s it for? Tell me about him not being dead.’
‘He is now,’ said Davies sombrely. ‘He died last October. In a canal in London.’
‘He couldn’t swim,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He wouldn’t even go in up to his knees at Clacton. He could climb but not swim.’
‘He lived his last years in a men’s hostel,’ continued Davies carefully. ‘Nobody knew much about him. He reappeared after the War with a different name – he called himself Brock. Wilfred Henry Brock. Known as Lofty.’
A soft smile settled on her pink face. ‘Lofty,’ she said. ‘Fancy that.’
‘When he died,’ said Davies, ‘the hostel people went through his belongings. There wasn’t much, but this was there.’ He took from his pocket an envelope, and from it produced the picture of the girl in the tin frame. At once she reached out for it as an eager child might reach for a toy.
‘Oh,’ she breathed, looking into her own youthful face. ‘My Chelmsford jail picture.’ She looked up, her eyes happy. ‘And he had this still,’ she said.
‘It was in an envelope with your name on it, Mavis Anne Prenderley,’ he said. ‘But no address or anything. That’s why it has taken me so long to find you.’
‘Just to give it back?’ she said.
‘Not really.’ He had to tell his lies carefully now. ‘There were some other things.’
A delayed embarrassment seized her. ‘Oh,’ she said, her pink hands going to her mouth. ‘Now you know I was in Chelmsford. In prison. I just told you. I’ve never told anybody.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, patting her hand as she lowered it. ‘It was a long time ago and all this is confidential.’
‘They sent me in because it wasn’t the first time,’ she admitted. ‘I’d been leaving windows open for Billy before that. We’d worked together for quite a long time. I’d get a job in the house and then he would pinch the silver. It was while I was inside Chelmsford that he started working with other girls.’ She looked fondly at the photograph. ‘They took these in the chapel,’ she said. ‘They only used it for prayers on Sunday so it was empty the rest of the time. The man would tell you to look at the Cross and then he’d take the photo. That’s why I’m staring like that.’
Feelings of guilt and worry moved within Davies. When there were stops and voices from outside the front door, he found himself glancing in that direction as if he believed that Inspector Joliffe and a posse of Essex Constabulary were about to burst in. ‘There was also this,’ he said to the woman. He took out the bag containing the single pearl.
Once again she sounded a small exclamation of recognition. ‘Now, look at that,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d see that again!’
‘It was the only thing of real value he left … among his possessions,’ said Davies.
Diffidently her fingers came across the table and she took the pearl. ‘Billy always reckoned he’d give me this.’
Hurriedly, Davies held out his hand. ‘I’m afraid,’ he flustered, ‘I can’t let you have it just yet.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ she said reasonably, handing the pearl back. ‘I wouldn’t want it. I know where he got it. It might be years ago, but it’s still stolen.’
‘That was all he had,’ said Davies, putting the pearl away. He glanced at the photograph in the frame which lay between them on the table. Without seeming to catch his look, she picked it up and handed it to him.
‘It’s all ancient history,’ she said. ‘Me included.’
‘What did he do with the other stuff?’ Davies asked her. ‘The proceeds of the robberies? He didn’t appear to spend much.’
‘Not even on girls,’ she agreed. ‘Fish and chips on the bus coming home from Clacton isn’t what you’d call high living, is it?’ She regarded him steadily. ‘He tucked it away somewhere. Hid it. I don’t know where. I bet nobody else does either, not now Billy’s gone. He never believed in trying to get rid of stuff too early, too quick. That was how you got found out, he used to say. And the prices were bad. His idea was to tuck it all away, for years if necessary. When he was called up for the army, he thought it would give him a couple of years’ break before he went back for the stuff he’d hidden.’
‘Then he thought of coming back under another name,’ suggested Davies. ‘Starting again and just picking the odd bit of jewellery out to sell? But it didn’t work out like that. He apparently never went back to it. He lived in near poverty.’
‘Could be that somebody got there before him,’ said Mavis Prenderley. ‘All I know is it wasn’t me.’
He knew it was time to go. ‘I’ll let you know what happens,’ he said, rising and shaking hands with her. He hesitated again over the fabrication. ‘About the insurance. You may well benefit.’
She smiled at him. ‘You’re a policeman, you are,’ she said.
Davies was shocked. His mouth opened but only disjointed words emerged. ‘I’m … me? Police?’
‘I can tell a copper from here to the sea front,
’ she said. ‘But it’s all right. I’m in the clear. I haven’t done anything wrong for years.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Davies mumbled. His face was hot.
‘It’s all right,’ she repeated. ‘I was expecting you anyway. Inspector Joliffe from Chelmsford said you’d probably be along.’
Davies’s lips still hurt from all the pretence of singing aboard the choral coach. He could feel how sore they were against the edge of the beer tankard. ‘All the way there,’ he complained to Mod, ‘and all the ruddy way back. And they sang the two hours in the middle as well. They must have mouths like rhinos.’
‘Except Jemma,’ suggested Mod, looking up expectantly.
‘Except Jemma,’ he agreed. ‘She only sings the solo bits.’
They drank up and headed towards ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens. The evenings were a touch lighter now. Soon the clocks would be changing. Soon Davies would be shedding his long johns. They had left The Babe In Arms at an unusually early time so that Davies could give some attention to his dog which had thrown a mad mood during the day his master was absent at Southend, bolting from the garage and colliding with a Greek-born bookmaker’s clerk in the street. The man had been toppled, his small change had rolled away and his betting slips were scattered to the spring-time wind. The early prostitute, Venus the Evening Star as Davies had always called her, had witnessed the affray and had hardly stopped laughing since. The dog had allowed himself to be captured by her, thus saving further mayhem.
Kitty was sitting in the back seat of the Vanguard with the door open like a soldier in a sentry box. He growled, as was his habit, when he saw Davies but then, to the man’s intense pleasure, the dog rubbed his tangled head against him and even performed a token lick with his damp salmon tongue.
‘See that,’ said Davies proudly to Mod. ‘See, he likes me.’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 40