‘What did they do?’ I asked.
‘Well, a soldier comes to the window of the van and asked me daddy for his card and he gives it to him. ‘Who’s that with you?’ he says, meaning the queer fella. ‘That’s me eldest son,’ says me daddy, and he takes the card back and puts it in the other fella’s pocket. Well, the soldier steps round the van and asks the other fella for his card. ‘With pleasure,’ he says and takes me daddy’s card out of his pocket. Well, of course, they weren’t surprised that the names were the same, so they let them go.’ He chuckled reflectively as we laughed. ‘He was a quick-thinking fella was me daddy, God bless him.’
‘Did you manage to make anything out of Sergeant Reynolds’ memoirs?’ I asked Sheila.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve scribbled on every piece of paper in my bag and Martin got me some more, but none of it seems to tie up. The only really new thing we’ve got is the name of the guy who took the piccy — Jim the landlord. I don’t really think that helps much.’
We went over her notes. We compared them with the notes from our talk with little Mrs Cassidy, but we had no blinding insights. In the end we gave it up and went for a dip in the lake.
The water, fed from mountain streams, was ice-cold even in midsummer but we found ways to warm ourselves when we came out. Afterwards we sat and watched a hot red sun slide down behind the hills. Soon it was dark and a little breeze began to flick the surface of the reservoir.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You can hear the bells if you listen closely.’
‘What bells?’
‘There’s two villages under the lake. They were flooded in the fifties when the dam was built. The Welsh say you can hear the church bells from one of them when the wind blows.’ ‘Really?’ she said. ‘That’s sad, that poor little church, down in the depths, ringing for services and nobody comes.’
‘If I didn’t know better,’ I said, ‘I’d think you were a real softy.’
‘Oh, I am,’ she said. ‘I am,’ and pulled me into a clinch. ‘Tell you what,’ she whispered in my ear, ‘if I ask you to marry me, can we do it down there? A scuba wedding like they have at Surfers Paradise?’
‘Yes,’ I said, instantly. ‘If we can find a Welsh vicar with a wetsuit you’re on, but one of us is going to do a lot of commuting.’
‘No worries.’ She smiled. ‘We’ll think of something, Chris.’
Some time later we strolled hand in hand back to the camp. A few people still sat by the fire in the darkness and Paddy was crooning one of his old songs to them, but I wanted to preserve the moments by the lake so we bade them goodnight and turned in.
It can’t have been five minutes after I had turned out the gas mantle over our bunk when Sheila sat up and started to grab about in the dark on the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ I complained.
‘Put the light on,’ she commanded. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
I groped for the matches on the windowsill and relit the gas. She had dragged her bag on to the bed and got Walter Brown’s tin out.
‘It was that tale of Paddy’s,’ she explained. ‘About two blokes using one identity card. It’s not that, but it’s something like it.’
She had taken out the two ration books and was leafing through the one for James Brown.
‘What do those mean?’ she demanded, and showed me a page with rubber-stamped addresses on it.
‘You had to register,’ I said. ‘For certain goods you had to be registered with a supplier, a grocer, a butcher and so on. Why?’
‘Because this isn’t Great Uncle Jim’s ration book, that’s why!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘He was in Nottingham all through the war. Look at those addresses — they’re all Belston shops. He didn’t travel sixty miles every time he wanted his two ounces of butter. This is some other James Brown’s ration book.’
My mind was beginning to work again. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘but what does that mean?’
‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘Grandpa kept a picture of blokes with ration books that he thought was significant. He also kept a ration book that belonged to someone called James Brown. He knew it wasn’t his brother’s. He must have thought that was significant too. It’s all about ration books!’
‘The black market?’ I queried. ‘That can’t be worth killing people about fifty years on, can it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but it’s about ration books and I’ll tell you something else — I bet Jim Brown was the bloke that took the picture. Where else did Grandpa get it?’
18
I woke in the grey pre-dawn light next morning and lay, smoking and trying to think it all through. I kept getting confused by the recollection that I had promised to marry the beautiful girl who slept quietly beside me. I had one short, brutal marriage behind me — to a fellow law student who believed that marrying a promising young solicitor was an easier route to a life of luxury than practising her profession. It worked just long enough for us to get out of law school and for me to go to work — for the wrong firm. Suddenly the scales fell from her eyes and she saw that I couldn’t care less about property law or commercial law or tax avoidance or any of those things that pay for designer goodies for lawyers’ wives, that I was actually interested in trying to achieve a little justice for people. When that happened she took off — with the car, the best of the furniture, the statuette from the hall that Daddy bought us and the junior partner in a commercial practice, with whom she has been expensively and maliciously unhappy ever since.
Now, here I was about to try again, and where was here? A travellers’ camp in Wales, outside which were a brace of psychopaths and an unspecified number of hired thugs who had now proved several times that someone preferred Sheila and me dead. It looked like an even worse beginning than the first time round.
The first rays of light woke the birds, who woke the camp bantams, who woke the camp dogs, who woke the camp children, who woke their mothers and suddenly it sounded like the Battle of the Somme outside the trailer. Sheila woke and rolled over, smiling at me in a way that made the whole ridiculous mess seem much more probable.
‘Good-day, counsellor,’ she said. ‘Penny for ’em?’
‘I was just wondering,’ I said, ‘if you really meant it, last night.’
‘If you mean the marrying bit,’ she said, pulling me into an embrace, ‘the answer’s yes. My head of department back home says that when a girl finds a good man she ought to shoot him and have him stuffed before he goes off. You look like you’ve got the makings to me, Chris Tyroll, so I guess you’re stuck with it,’ and she wrapped herself so entirely around me I couldn’t have argued if I’d wanted to.
When I surfaced I said, ‘There was the other bit as well — the brainwave.’
‘The thingy books? The ration books?’ she queried. ‘That’s just got to be part of the answer, Chris. There’s no other reason why Grandpa had the picture and some other fellow’s book. There’s some kind of connection — there’s got to be.’
I nodded. ‘The only thing is,’ I said, ‘that everyone was into the black market then. How could it matter so much now that they’ll kill for it?’
‘Perhaps they killed then,’ she said. ‘Remember — a couple of those blokes in the picture came to sticky ends. One went into a canal and another ended up knifed in an alley — unsolved. Two of them just melted away, didn’t they? Maybe there’s a very old murder or two in this.’
‘Could be,’ I agreed. ‘We’ve never checked out Norman Berry.’ I told her about my attempts to track him from the phone book. ‘Look,’ I said, coming to a sudden decision, ‘we can’t do anything about it while we’re here. I’m going back to the Midlands.’
She pulled away from me. ‘You’re going back? What do I do? Stay here and get on with my embroidery like a good little girl?’
‘Hold on a minute. Miley misled the baddies into thinking we’d gone back. By now they must have scoured Belston and district for us and they’ll be pretty sure we’re not
there. So they’re going to try and pick up the trail where they lost it — here. Paddy and his folk can’t disappear completely and I’d hate to be responsible for those thugs cutting loose on this camp. If I appear back in Belston, they won’t touch me because they want to find you. Meanwhile I’ll have a better chance of finding out what the piccy means. Make sense?’
She grimaced. ‘I suppose it does, but I don’t like it, Chris. How can we keep in touch?’
‘You can ring Claude the Phantom’s answering machine every day. Give it a callbox number and I’ll call you there at seven.’
Grudgingly she muttered her agreement, then dragged me back into an embrace. Later she whispered, ‘Look after yourself, Chris Tyroll. You’ve got some very nice bits I’d like to keep.’
Over breakfast I outlined the plan to Paddy. He said little, but his slow nod showed his agreement. ‘Never fear,’ he said, ‘we’ll look after the lady. By the way,’ he continued, ‘Queenie says she’d like to see the pair of you.’
We followed him across the ring of the little camp to another large trailer on the other side. It was the same make as Paddy’s, but brocaded velvet drapes darkened every window. Paddy knocked at its door and waited until a female voice called us in.
‘If you think Paddy’s trailer is something,’ I whispered to Sheila, ‘just wait till you get in here.’
There was no kitchen area in the big trailer. At the far end, the bedroom area was closed off with heavy drapes and the near-end bow had been turned into a permanent sitting room. It was lavishly furnished with embroidered cushions and the floor underfoot was thick with decorative rugs. The only light came from small gas-burners in coloured glasses, whose light sparkled off shelves of gold-ornamented Royal Doulton china and deep ruby cut-glass ware.
On a rocking-chair in the midst of this splendour sat Queenie Connors, matriarch of Paddy’s tribe, ninety years old if she was a day and maybe much more. Still tall, despite her years, she was a lean-faced, hawk-nosed old lady, whose bright black eyes betrayed that she had more than traveller blood. Her imperious features were framed in a cascade of silver hair, bound across her brow with an embroidered red fillet.
As we entered she gave a gap-toothed grin and raised her wrinkled and bejewelled hands. ‘Mr Tyroll, young lady,’ she welcomed us. ‘Come in and have a seat,’ and she dismissed Paddy with a wave.
We sat alongside her and as our eyes grew accustomed to the colourful gloom of the trailer I realised that a tall, silent girl stood behind the rocking-chair. She now turned it to face us and vanished into the rear of the trailer.
Queenie leaned forward, her jewellery throwing sparkles in our faces. She took my left hand and Sheila’s right in hers and held them side by side. She looked up, gazing from one to another of us.
‘Paddy Murphy says you have troubles,’ she stated, ‘but there are no troubles so bad they will not end. You have been a help to me and mine in trouble, Mr Tyroll, now I must help you and your lady.’
She brushed our palms with the side of her old, dry thumbs. ‘I am traveller and Romany,’ she said, ‘I have the kohli rat, the black blood of India. I can see and I can tell.’
She fell silent, hunched over our hands. When she spoke again her voice was quieter, more sing-song.
‘Love and danger,’ she said, ‘love and danger. Here is love, true love that you must not deny, but you must not stay together for the danger. You are made for each other, it is in your blood. You have the blood of all the world in you and the lady has the travelling blood. She has come a long way to find you and you have waited a long time for her, but you are one and shall be one.’
She paused again and lifted her piercing eyes to our faces, but she seemed to be looking through us and beyond. Then she began again.
‘You do not know what it is you know, but there are evil men who seek you. You must go back, go back to Belston where the answer is, but the lady must not go. There is great danger there for her; she must stay among us. Her people were miners and some were travellers. She should be with her people where we can protect her. There is an old man in her heart, a tall, brave old man who is gone. You are sad and angry for his death, my dear, but you must hide now.
‘You,’ she said to me, ‘must go back, but do not go home. Those who seek you have placed a thing in your home that will trap you. It will trap you with this very hand. Do not go near it, it will do you harm. There is a picture in your heads, an old picture that you do not understand. Look into the picture. What you must know is all there. Look into the picture.’
Her voice trailed away and she clasped both of our hands together in hers.
‘Such love,’ she said, ‘such love, and dangers that will pass, but do not go home, Mr Tyroll, do not go home.’
She relinquished our hands and looked up again, smiling her almost toothless smile. She called her attendant who hurried out of the rear of the trailer with tall glasses of beer and we all drank in silence.
When the glasses were empty she looked at us, her head on one side. ‘Did I tell you the truth, Mr Tyroll?’
‘I do believe you did,’ I said. ‘It agrees with what I was thinking.’
‘I can see and I can tell,’ she repeated. ‘Then go and do what you must,’ she commanded, ‘and leave your lovely lady with us. I shall protect her till you come.’
Moments later, when we stood outside the trailer, Sheila blinked in the morning sun.
‘Phew!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that old identity for real?’
‘Very real,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen her do that a dozen times and she seems to know.’
‘But she could have got all that stuff from Paddy, couldn’t she?’
‘Not about your mining ancestors, she couldn’t,’ I said.
‘What did she mean that you have the blood of all the world?’
‘I’ve never told her, but my grandfather was a circus performer, from generations of them. She’s probably right. I do have the blood of all the world and I bet there’s a drop of Romany blood somewhere.’
‘You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Chris Tyroll?’ she said. ‘She knew about that. What was the bit about the coaly rat or whatever?’
‘That’s Romany,’ I said, ‘the gypsy language. It means ‘black blood’, the pure old dark-skinned Romany blood from northern India. Those who have it are very proud of it. Old Queenie is what the Roms call a diddikoi.’
‘I thought that was just a gypsy?’
‘No. Only settled people think it means that. It’s a Romany word that means a half-breed gypsy-traveller.’
‘Well, what’s the difference between travellers and gypsies?’
‘I told you — the travellers have been here since God knows when, some say the Bronze Age. They have a language called Shelta. It’s a jumble of words from all over but the bedrock of it is one of the oldest tongues in Europe. The Romany gypsies came here five hundred years ago, from India. Their language is Romany which is a dialect of Sanskrit.’
‘My oath!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you tell them apart?’
I laughed. ‘There’s only supposed to be one way. Gypsies think that roasted hedgehog is a delicacy; travellers think that eating hedgehogs is a dirty habit.’
‘What’s a hedgehog?’ she asked, and I had to start explaining all over again.
At lunchtime Paddy brought Miley to the trailer. ‘He’ll see you to Shrewsbury,’ he said, jerking his thumb at the gangling, blond youth, ‘and you see that he drives you safely.’ Sheila clung to me before we left. ‘Be careful!’ she commanded. ‘Remember what Queenie said about a trap.’
‘I’ve never been daft enough to ignore one of Queenie’s warnings,’ I said. ‘I guess she means that the enemy’s bugged my house.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but they’re killers. They might have booby-trapped it with one of their damned firebombs. Just look after yourself, Chris Tyroll.’
Miley and I left in mid-afternoon. Even to my non-expert eyes I could see that the lad’s lates
t car was a low, open-topped early sixties job, older than me, but once we were under way it was soon apparent that it had a lot more power than it needed. We dropped down across the dam road and, in minutes, the little cluster of trailers was out of sight.
At the first small town we came to I got Miley to stop, so that I could buy a jacket, a shirt and a few other necessaries. Coming out of the little gents’ outfitters I was dismayed to find a presence of uniformed security men in the street, and had to remind myself that all their uniforms looked alike; this team were evidently collecting a payroll from the bank.
Half an hour later Miley said, ‘Look in the mirror.’
I looked. Well back behind us was a dark-green van, the same colour as the security van that had stood outside the bank.
‘Is he following?’ I asked.
‘I think so. Watch this.’
Miley swung us off the main road into a left turning and followed a winding lane up a hillside. From the brow we could see that the van had turned off after us.
‘He’s not going anywhere that we’re not,’ said Miley.
‘They must have spotted me at the shops back there,’ I said. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Get rid of him, that’s what!’
19
Miley drove steadily for a short time, until the van dropped from sight behind us, then he slammed his foot to the floor and the car leapt away beneath us. I grabbed the door-top and hung on for dear life as he twisted the vehicle through the narrow road, flinging it into amazing turns around rocky outcrops and through deep gullies.
At last we turned the corner of a rocky bluff and came out on a stretch of open moorland, dotted with rocks, across which the road wound. The car jolted across an iron cattle grid and, beyond it, Miley stamped on the brake, almost hurling me through the windscreen. Before I had recovered he had sprung from the car and was racing back along the road, shouting, ‘Come on! Come on!’
The Victory Snapshot (A Chris Tyroll Mystery Book 1) Page 12