When he returned Wallington said, ‘What an old battle- axe. Did you happen to know the Page-Manleys. Didn’t know they were still around, people like that.’
Sylvia was looking at Bertie. ‘Alf, you’re shocking our host.’
‘Sorry, man, but honest, I thought they kept her sort in museums. Stuffed.’
‘You mustn’t say stuffed. That’ll shock Bertie too.’
Bertie said stiffly, ‘I am not in the least shocked, but I certainly regard it as the height of bad manners to criticise a guest in such a manner. Lucy is a very dear friend of mine.’
Sylvia at least had some understanding of his feelings. She said sorry and smiled, so that he was at once inclined to forgive her. Then she said it was time she took her rough diamonds home.
Thanks for the grub,’ Wallington said. Then he leaned across the dining table and shouted, ‘Wake up, man, it’s tomorrow morning already.’ Jimmy had fallen asleep in his chair. He was hauled to his feet and supported across the garden.
Bertie called up Lucy the next morning and apologised again. She said that he should think no more about it. ‘I didn’t take to that South African feller, though. Shouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to be a bad hat. And I didn’t care too much for your neighbours, if you don’t mind my being frank.’
Bertie said of course not, although he reflected that there seemed to be a sudden spasm of frankness among his acquaintances. Mrs Purchase, Lucy said, had a roving eye. She left it at that, and they went on to discuss the agenda for the next meeting of the historical society.
Later in the morning there was a knock on the door. Jimmy was there, hollow-eyed and slightly green. ‘ ‘Fraid we rather blotted our copybook last night. Truth is, Alf and I were fairly well loaded before we came round. Can’t remember too much about it, but Syl said apologies were in order.’
Bertie asked when Sylvia’s cousin was leaving. Jimmy Purchase shrugged and said he didn’t know. Bertie nearly said that he ought not to leave the man alone with Sylvia, but refrained. He might be inquisitive, but he was also discreet.
A couple of nights later he was doing some weeding in the garden when he heard voices raised in Linton House. One was Jimmy’s, the other belonged to Sylvia. They were in the sitting-room shouting at each other, not quite loudly enough for the words to be distinguishable. It was maddening not to know what was being said. Bertie moved along the fence separating the gardens, until he was as near as he could get without being seen. He was now able to hear a few phrases.
‘Absolutely sick of it … drink because it takes my mind off … told you we have to wait …’ That was Jimmy. Then Sylvia’s voice, shrill as he had never heard it, shrill and sneering.
Tell me the old old story … how long do we bloody well wait then … you said it would be finished by now.’ An indistinguishable murmur from Jimmy. ‘None of your business,’ she said. More murmuring. ‘None of your business what I do.’ Murmur murmur. ‘You said yourself we’re broke.’ To this there was some reply. Then she said clearly, ‘I shall do what I like.’ ‘All right,’ Jimmy said, so loudly that Bertie fairly jumped. There followed a sharp crack, which sounded like hand on flesh.
Sylvia said, ‘You bastard, that’s it, then.’
Nothing more. No sound, no speech. Bertie waited five minutes and then tiptoed away, fearful of being seen. Once indoors again he felt quite shaky, and had to restore himself by a nip of brandy. What had the conversation meant? Much of it was plain enough, Sylvia was saying that it was none of her husband’s business if she carried on an affair. But what was it they had to wait for, what was it that should have been finished? A deal connected with the odious Alf? And where was Alf who as Bertie had noticed went out into the village very little?
He slept badly, and was wakened in the middle of the night by a piercing, awful scream. He sat up in bed quivering, but the sound was not repeated. He decided that he must have been dreaming.
On the following day the car was not in the garage. Had Jimmy gone off again? He met Sylvia out shopping in the village, and she said that he had been called to an assignment at short notice.
‘What sort of assignment?’ He had asked before for the name of the paper Jimmy worked on, to be told that he was a freelance.
‘A Canadian magazine. He’s up in the Midlands, may be away a few days.’
Should he say something about the row? But that would have been indiscreet, and in any case Sylvia had such a wild look in her eye that he did not care to ask further questions. It was on that morning that he read about the Small Bank Robbers.
The Small Bank Robbers had been news for some months. They specialised in fast well-organised raids on banks, and had carried out nearly twenty of these in the past year. Several men were involved in each raid. They were armed, and did not hesitate to use coshes or revolvers when necessary. In one bank a screaming woman customer had suffered a fractured skull when hit over the head, and in another a guard who resisted the robbers had been shot and killed. The diminutive applied to them referred to the banks they robbed, not to their own physical dimensions. A bank clerk who had admitted giving information to the gang had asked why they were interested in his small branch bank, and had been told that they always raided small banks because they were much more vulnerable than large ones. After the arrest of this clerk the robbers seemed to have gone to ground. There had been no news of them for the last three or four weeks.
Bertie had heard about the Small Bank Robbers, but took no particular interest in them. He was a nervous man, and did not care for reading about crime. On this morning, however, his eye was caught by the heading: ‘Small Bank Robbers. The South African Connection.’ The story was a feature by the paper’s crime reporter, Derek Holmes. He said that Scotland Yard knew the identities of some of the robbers, and described his own investigations, which led to the conclusion that three or four of them were in Spain. The article continued:
But there is another connection, and a sinister one. The men in Spain are small fry. My researches suggest that the heavy men who organised the robberies, and were very ready to use violence, came from South Africa. They provided the funds and the muscle. Several witnesses who heard the men talking to each other or giving orders during the raids have said that they used odd accents. This has been attributed to the sound distortion caused by the stocking masks they wore, but two men I spoke to, both of whom have spent time in South Africa, said that they had no doubt the accent was South African.
The writer suggested that these men were now probably back in South Africa. But supposing that one of them was still in England, that he knew Jimmy and Sylvia and had a hold over them? Supposing, even, that they were minor members of the gang themselves? The thought made Bertie shiver with fright and excitement. What should or could he do about it? And where had Jimmy Purchase gone?
Again he slept badly, and when he did fall into a doze it was a short one. He woke to find Wallington knocking on the door. Once inside the house he drew out a huge wad of notes, said that there was enough for everybody, and counted out bundles which he put on the table between them with a small decisive thwack. A second bundle, thwack, and a third, thwack. How many more? He tried to cry out, to protest, but the bundles went on, thwack, thwack, thwack …
He sat up in bed, crying out something inaudible. The thin grey light of early morning came through the curtains. There was a sound in the garden outside, a sound regularly repeated, the thwack of his dream. It took him in his slightly dazed state a little while to realise that if he went to the window he might see what was causing the sound. He tiptoed across the room and raised the curtain. He was trembling.
It was still almost dark, and whatever was happening was taking place at the back of Linton House, so that he could not see it. But as he listened to the regularly repeated sound, he had no doubt of its nature. Somebody was digging out there. The sound of the spade digging earth had entered his dream, and there was an occasional clink when it struck a stone. Why would somebody be dig
ging at this time in the morning? He remembered that terrible cry on the previous night, the cry he had thought to be a dream. Supposing it had been real, who had cried out?
The digging stopped and two people spoke, although he could not hear the words or even the tones. One, light and high in pitch, was no doubt Sylvia, but was the other voice Wallington’s? And if it was, had Jimmy Purchase gone away at all? In the half light a man and woman were briefly visible before they passed into the house. The man carried a spade, but his head was down and Bertie could not see his face, only his square bulky figure. He had little doubt that the man was Wallington.
That morning he went up to London. He had visited the city rarely since his retirement, finding that on each visit he was more worried and confused. The place seemed continually to change, so that what had been a landmark of some interest was now a kebab or hamburger restaurant. The article had appeared in the Banner, and their offices had moved from Fleet Street to somewhere off the Grays Inn Road. He asked for Arnold Grayson, a deputy editor he had known slightly, to be told that Grayson had moved to another paper. He had to wait almost an hour before he was able to talk to Derek Holmes. The crime reporter remained staring at his desk while he listened to Bertie’s story. During the telling of it he chewed gum and said ‘Yup’ occasionally.
‘Yup,’ he said again at the end. ‘Okay, Mr Mays. Thanks.’ ‘What are you going to do about it?’
Holmes removed his gum and considered the question.
‘Know how many people been in touch about that piece, saying they’ve seen the robbers, their landlord’s one of them, they heard two South Africans talking in a bus about how the loot should be split, etcetera? One hundred and eleven. Half of ’em are sensationalists, the other half plain crazy.’
‘But this is different.’
‘They’re all different. I shouldn’ta seen you only you mentioned Arnie, and he was a good friend. But what’s it amount to? Husband and wife have a shindig, husband goes off, South African cousin’s digging a flowerbed ’
‘At that time in the morning?’
The reporter shrugged. ‘People are funny.’
‘Have you got pictures of the South Africans you say are involved in the robberies? If I could recognise Wallington ’
Holmes put another piece of gum in his mouth, chewed on it meditatively, and then produced half-a-dozen photographs. None of them resembled Wallington. Holmes shuffled the pictures together, put them away. ‘That’s it then.’
‘But aren’t you going to come down and look into it? I tell you I believe murder has been done. Wallington is her lover. Together they have killed Purchase.’
‘If Wallington’s lying low with his share of the loot, the last thing he’d do is get involved in this sort of caper. You know your trouble, Mr Mays? You’ve got an overheated imagination.’ If only he knew somebody at Scotland Yard! But there was no reason to think that they would take him any more seriously than the newspaper man had done. He returned feeling both chastened and frustrated. To his surprise Sylvia got out of another carriage on the train. She greeted him cheerfully.
‘Hallo Bertie. I’ve just been seeing Alf off.’
‘Seeing Alf off?’ he echoed stupidly.
‘Back to South Africa. He had a letter saying they needed him back there.’
Hack in Durban?’
That’s right.’
‘Jimmy said he was from the Cape.’
‘Did he? Jimmy often gets things wrong.’
It was not in Bertie’s nature to be anything but gallant to a lady, even one he suspected of being a partner in murder. ‘Now that you are a grass widow again, you must come in and have a dish of tea.’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘It’s a date.’
They had reached his cottage. She pressed two fingers to her lips, touched his cheek with them. Inside the cottage the telephone was ringing. It was Holmes.
‘Mr Mays? Thought you’d like to know. Your chum Purchase is just what he said, a freelance journalist. One or two of the boys knew him. Not too successful from what I hear.’
‘So you did pay some attention to what I told you,’ Bertie said triumphantly.
‘Always try and check a story out. Nothing to this one, far as I can see.’
‘Wallington has gone back to South Africa. Suddenly, just like that.’
‘Has he now? Good luck to him.’
Triumph was succeeded by indignation. He put down the telephone without saying goodbye.
Was it all the product of an overheated imagination? He made scones for Sylvia’s visit next day, and served them with his home-made blackcurrant conserve. Then he put the question that still worried him. He would have liked to introduce it delicately, but somehow didn’t manage that.
‘What was all that digging in the garden early the other morning?’
Sylvia looked startled, and then exclaimed as a fragment of the scone she was eating dropped on to her dress. When it had been removed she said, ‘Sorry you were disturbed. It was Timmy.’
‘Timmy?’
‘Our tabby. He must have eaten something poisoned and he died. Poor Timmy. Alf dug a grave and we gave him a Christian burial.’ With hardly a pause she went on, ‘We’re clearing out at the end of the week.’
‘Leaving?’ For a moment he could hardly believe it.
‘Right. I’m a London girl at heart you know, always was. The idea of coming here was that Jimmy would be able to do some writing of his own, but that never seemed to work out, he was always being called away. If I’m in London I can get a job, earn some money. Very necessary at the moment. If Alf hadn’t helped out, I don’t know what we’d have done. It was a crazy idea coming down here, but then we’re crazy people.’
And at the end of that week Sylvia went. Since the house had been rented furnished, she had only suitcases to take away. She came to say goodbye. There was no sign of Jimmy, and Bertie asked about him.
‘Still up on that job. But anyway he wouldn’t have wanted to come down and help, he hates things like that. Goodbye, Bertie, we’ll meet again I expect.’ A quick kiss on the cheek and she was driving off in her hired car.
She departed leaving all sorts of questions unanswered when Bertie came to think about it, mundane ones like an address if anybody should want to get in touch with her or with Jimmy, and things he would have liked to know, such as the reason for digging the cat’s grave at such an extraordinary hour. He found himself more and more suspicious of the tale she had told. The row he had overhead could perhaps be explained by lack of money, but it seemed remarkable that Jimmy Purchase had not come back. Linton House was locked up and empty, but it was easy enough to get into the garden. The area dug up was just inside the boundary fence. It was difficult to see how much had been dug because there were patches of earth at either side, but it looked a large area to bury a cat.
On impulse one day, a week after Sylvia had gone, Bertie took a spade into the garden and began to dig. It proved to be quite hard work, and he went down two feet before reaching the body. It was that of a cat, one he vaguely remembered seeing in the house, but Sylvia’s story of its death had been untrue. Its head was mangled, shattered by one or two heavy blows.
Bertie looked at the cat with distaste – he did not care for seeing dead things – returned it, and had just finished shovelling back the earth when he was hailed from the road. He turned, and with a sinking heart saw the local constable, PC Harris, standing beside his bicycle.
‘Ah, it’s you, Mr Mays. I was thinking it might be somebody with burglarious intent. Somebody maybe was going to dig a tunnel to get entrance into the house. But perhaps it was your own house you was locked out of.’ PC Harris was well known as a local wag, and nobody laughed more loudly at his own jokes. He laughed heartily now. Bertie joined in feebly.
‘But what was you doing digging in the next door garden may I ask?’
What could he say? I was digging for a man, but only foun
d a cat? Desperately Bertie said, ‘I’d – ah – lost something and thought it might have got in here. I was just turning the earth.’
The constable shook his head. ‘You was trespassing, Mr Mays. This is not your property.’
‘No, of course not. It won’t happen again. I’d be glad if you could forget it.’ He approached the constable, a pound note in his hand.
‘No need for that, sir, which might be construed as a bribe and hence an offence in itself. I shall not be reporting the matter on this occasion, nor enquiring further into the whys and wherefores, but would strongly advise you in future to keep within the bounds of your own property.’
Pompous old fool, Bertie thought, but said that of course he would do just that. He scrambled back into his own garden, aware that he made a slightly ludicrous figure. PC Harris, in a stately manner, mounted his bicycle and rode away.
That was almost, but not quite, the end of the story. Linton House was empty for a few weeks and then let again, to a family called Hobson who had two noisy children. Bertie had as little to do with them as possible. He was very conscious of having been made to look a fool, and there was nothing he disliked more than that. He was also aware of a disinclination in himself to enter Linton House again.
In the late spring of the following year he went to Sardinia for a holiday, driving around on his own, looking at the curious nuraghi and the burial places made from gigantic blocks of stone which are called the tombs of the giants. He drove up the western coast in a leisurely way, spending long mornings and afternoons over lunches and dinners in the small towns, and then moving inland to bandit country. He was sitting nursing a drink in a square at Nuoro, which is the capital of the central province, when he heard his name called.
It was Sylvia, so brown that he hardly recognised her. ‘Bertie, what are you doing here?’
He said that he was on holiday,’ and returned the question.
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