The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  “That’s not what Mrs Williams said.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was waiting on the doorstep when I got back last night. According to her, you started picking on her husband as soon as I’d left, wouldn’t let him give any orders to the staff; took over his job in fact.”

  “And did you believe Mrs Williams?”

  “Not entirely, but I’d like to hear your version.”

  “I haven’t got a version,” said Oliver. He was leaning back in his favourite position, relaxed, but with his soft brown eyes watchful. “I just told Williams that unless he resigned I’d have to report him to the police.”

  “For what?”

  “Larceny. Or maybe it was embezzlement. I don’t know. I knew there was something wrong when he was so reluctant to hand over the key of the dangerous-drug store. I can quite see why. He’s been helping himself to morphine syrettes out of the tank kits. I thought he might be an addict the first time I saw him – that odd chin-jerk they get as if they’re trying to unscrew their heads at the neck. Do you remember that Quartermaster Sergeant in North Africa?”

  Dumbo said, “For God’s sake,” and sat down quickly as if his knees had been cut from under him.

  “You noticed I filled him up with whisky a bit at lunchtime that day. It’s always fatal for a real addict. The more drink he takes the more he wants the other stuff. That’s why he had to dash home and give himself a quick booster before he could show us round the works.”

  “Did he admit it?”

  “When I showed him the indents and sales records he couldn’t very well deny it. He was the only person who had the key. He’d told me so himself.”

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “I gave him the name of a doctor at Watford who deals with that sort of thing. I don’t know if he’ll go to him or not.”

  “Come to that,” said Dumbo, whose mind was beginning to grapple with the problem, “what are we going to do? You can’t do Williams’ job permanently as well as your own. Nor can I.”

  “I’ve tackled that one too,” said Oliver. “I haven’t finalized anything because I didn’t want to take an important decision without consulting you.”

  He said this with a grin and was relieved to see Dumbo grin too.

  “You’re a bloody liar,” he said. “You only consult other people about things that don’t really matter. What have you done?”

  “I contacted Miss Challen’s father – Sergeant Challen. He wasn’t too happy in his lorry-driving job, and I told him that if you agreed, he could have a shot at smartening up this place. I also threw out the suggestion that if he could get hold of one or two other useful types – particularly in REME or Signals – we might be able to use them.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Dumbo for the third time that morning. “What is this? A factory or a private army.”

  “A private army may be just what we need,” said Oliver. “I’ll tell you more when I’ve seen brother Stackpool. I’m having audience with him this afternoon.”

  Mr Stackpool removed his glasses with every appearance of relief, ran a hand upwards and backwards over the smooth summit of his head, and said that he was very glad to see Mr Nugent again – splendid debut he had made at the Social Club – carried off the second prize – do even better next time probably. What could he do for him? – was it a personal problem or was it a Company matter? – Quinn & Nicholsons – fine old firm – used to play a lot of golf with old Mr Nicholson before the war.

  “There’s one preliminary point I’d like to clear up,” said Oliver. “Do you happen to act for the Strickland Engineering Company?”

  “Afraid not,” said Mr Stackpool. “I’d very much like to. Another fine old Company, but they use London solicitors.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Oliver, “because if they were your clients you couldn’t have acted for us.”

  Mr Stackpool sat up in his chair, picked up his glasses, weighed them in his hand and said, “You having a fight with them?”

  “I’m not sure. It depends on whether we can win it or not. I never start a fight unless I’m sure I can win it.”

  Mr Stackpool smiled a little uncertainly and said, “Sound principle, of course. What are you proposing to fight over?”

  “It’s a right of way.” Oliver extracted a fat envelope from his briefcase. “These are the deeds of the property. I borrowed them from the bank, who were pretty unwilling to let them go, I may say. We seem to owe them rather a lot of money. This is the deed that transferred the property to Mr Nicholson Senior.”

  “The conveyance, yes.”

  “Right. There’s another one handing it over to the Company, but that’s not so important. The first conveyance was signed–”

  “Executed,” said Mr Stackpool mechanically.

  “–at a time when there was nothing there but a couple of fields between the canal and the road. The back field – that’s the one we’re built on – had a right of way through the front one on to the road. It’s still there too, only it’s no longer a path. It’s a concrete passage with a glass roof over it separating the two Strickland factory blocks, if you follow me.”

  “Perfectly,” said Mr Stackpool. He had his glasses back on his nose by now and was following the fifty-year-old law script with one pink finger. “Here’s the bit we want. ‘Together with a free right of ingress egress and regress over and across the land coloured pink between the points marked AB on the front boundary and CD on the rear boundary of the said land coloured pink – ’ This was drawn up in the days when we got paid for our conveyancing by the yard, ha-ha – ‘at all hours of the day or night, with or without horses carts or other vehicles for the benefit of the messuage delineated on the same plan and thereon coloured blue.’ Well, that’s all right as far as it goes.”

  “As far as it goes?”

  “Even a legal right of way can be lost if you don’t use it.”

  “We use it all right. Every night. The chaps go out that way.”

  “With vehicles?”

  “Some of them were wheeling bicycles.”

  Mr Stackpool considered the implications of this.

  “The best way to test it would be to have someone drive a vehicle over it. Could that be done?”

  “It’d cause a considerable sensation,” said Oliver. “The trouble is, I doubt if you’d actually get a car through the communicating door. Suppose someone rode a horse through it?”

  “Better still,” said Mr Stackpool, “if you used it for some business purpose. I expect you have those little hand-powered trolleys. They’d certainly be classed as vehicles.”

  “Curiously enough, we were discussing the question of buying some only the other day.”

  They talked for a bit about other matters. Mr Stackpool, behind his desk, was a different and shrewder person than Mr Stackpool at the bridge table.

  “Most of your insurances need doubling,” he said, “particularly the fire and third-party. They’re both at pre-war levels. Perfectly satisfactory in 1939, ridiculous now. Half the property in Elsfield Wood is under-insured. I act for one large garage and motor repair shop which hasn’t increased its insurance since it was built in 1930 – and won’t do it.”

  “Snyder’s?”

  “No names, no pack drill,” said Mr Stackpool hastily. As Oliver was going he added, “You realize that this quite definitely means a fight, don’t you?”

  “Over the right of way?”

  “Yes. I’ve heard a rumour that Stricklands are putting in for permission to rebuild. If you once established your right of way and they did want to build, they’d have to buy you out. Would you sell?”

  “At a price,” said Oliver.

  It was a fortnight later that Squadron Sergeant Challen, released from his Covent Garden duties, appeared at Quinn & Nicholsons. Skin the colour of a medlar and the texture of sandpaper; deceptively candid blue eyes, hair now grizzled but still cut in a pudding-basin ring as it had been since he was a r
ecruit, he contrived somehow to look even more formidable in mufti than he had in uniform.

  “It’s a bit of a shaky do at the moment,” admitted Oliver.

  “So my daughter tells me,” said Challen.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said the place had gone to pot under old Williams but that you and Mr Nicholson were going to make things hum.”

  “She’s an intelligent girl,” said Oliver with a grin. “We must promote her.”

  “Trouble with her is she wants to get an office job up in London. Doesn’t like getting her hands dirty.” Sergeant Challen spoke of his only daughter in exactly the tones he had used of recalcitrant troopers.

  “We’ll see about that,” said Oliver. “First things first. What we want here is new work, so that when we lose our army contract, we’ve got something else to get on with.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Anything, provided it’s got a profit margin or is in short supply. What about film developing? We could do it in our sleep with the equipment we’ve got. Undercut the chemists and bag all the work that’s going. And what about battery charging?”

  “Chicken feed,” said Challen.

  “Maybe,” said Oliver, “but it’s chicken feed that keeps chickens alive and laying. Then I thought we might have a shot at radio spare parts. We could buy army spares and adapt them, and what price the up-and-coming television market? I’m no technical expert, but I believe that most radar parts are interchangeable with television sets. They work on the same principle.”

  “If we could get hold of someone like Corporal Fisher,” said Challen, “or young Everton, you remember him, he used to be No. 1 operator on the Command set. They said he could take it to pieces and put it together again blindfolded–”

  “Get both of them,” said Oliver, “and anyone else who’s going. They’re going to be a lot cheaper to pick up now than they will be in a couple of years’ time. I wouldn’t mind having a few REME chaps too. Who was that enormous Scotsman?”

  “REME?” said Challen, looking dazed. “This isn’t a garage.”

  “No reason we shouldn’t run a garage as a sideline,” said Oliver. “It’ll be six or seven years before the motor trade catches up with the new car orders. During that time every spare part and every reconditioned engine is going to be floggable at twice its list price. There’s an empty bay at the end of the packing shed that’ll make a good workshop. It’s already got overhead block-and-tackle.”

  “You’re assuming, I suppose,” said Challen, “that we lose our present army contract?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Oliver, “I wasn’t assuming anything of the sort. I had an idea about that too, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t have two legs on the ground.”

  “Two hearts,” said Serena.

  Her husband peered at his hand in a short-sighted way, extracted a card which had strayed from the fold and restored it to its right suit, and finally said, “Two spades.” Oliver doubled.

  Arthur Strickland said, “Really, Francis, if you can’t do any better than that you’d better not call at all.”

  “I can’t call cards I haven’t got.”

  “I agree, but if you look at your hand as though it was an unexpected surtax demand and call ‘two spades’ in tones appropriate to a funeral on a wet Wednesday in Hull, you’re bound to give Mr Nugent ideas.”

  “Actually,” said Oliver, “I doubled on my own cards not on Francis’ tone of voice, which, to tell you the truth, I took to be a cunning subterfuge.”

  Arthur Strickland said “Hmm” and looked down at his own cards. Twenty years ago, thought Oliver, he must have been quite an arresting figure; tall, broad-shouldered and thick-necked. Now the brown of his skin was beginning to roughen off into the red of burst capillaries, the shoulders were dropping and little pouches of flesh were beginning to spoil the firm outline of his jaw. It was difficult to imagine two brothers more different from Arthur and the thin, pale, intellectual Francis. All the same, if he had been an insurance actuary, Oliver knew which one he would have backed.

  “Redouble,” said Arthur.

  “You’re bluffing,” said Serena. “I pass.”

  Francis looked more unhappy than ever. He started to count something up on his fingers, caught Arthur looking at him, and put his hand in his pocket. Then he said defiantly, “I pass too.”

  “Three hearts,” said Oliver.

  “Scared ’em,” said Arthur. “I pass.”

  “Four hearts,” said Serena, and Oliver looked at her with approval; an approval which increased when they made game and rubber, and broke off for refreshments.

  “We might as well face it,” said Arthur, inserting an egg sandwich into his mouth, “we’re in for a beating.”

  “You’re only fifteen points down so far,” said Serena. “Cheer up.”

  “I’m not talking about bridge,” said Arthur, “I’m talking about something that matters. Economics and politics. It won’t take those bloody Huns long to climb back into the world market again. Or the Eyties. The war’s been over less than eighteen months and they’re already starting to flood the market with cheap typewriters. It’s a critical position. Anyone with eyes in his head can see that, and what do we do about it? What do the bloody marvellous electorate of this country do? They turn out the man who won the war for them, the one man who could take a grip of things now, and they elect a paralytic bunch of parlour pinks, most of whom didn’t see a week of war service, and they start telling us what to do.”

  “Arthur doesn’t like this Town Planning Bill,” said Francis.

  “Have some more coffee,” said Serena.

  “Don’t you agree with me, Nugent?”

  Oliver said, “I entirely agree with you. I’d go further. I dislike and distrust all politicians. I’d abolish the lot.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Serena. “If you abolish all politicians who’s going to run the country?”

  “I’d elect a board of directors,” said Oliver. “Solid, experienced businessmen with no ideals, no platform and no political axes to grind. Their sole job would be to make money for the country. If you’re rich you’re happy. It’s as simple as that.”

  Arthur said “Hmm” and looked at Oliver suspiciously but he seemed sincere. Francis said, “It sounds all right, but would it work?”

  Serena said, “Of course it wouldn’t. I’ve never heard such nonsense in all my life.”

  “I don’t know so much,” said Arthur. “It sounds quite sensible to me. What we’ve lost is our old buccaneering business drive. We’ve gone soft. We spend half our time trying not to tread on other people’s toes and the other half saying sorry because we think we’ve hurt their feelings. American businessmen don’t behave like that, I can tell you, that’s why they’re leading the world.”

  Oliver said, “I concur entirely. Shall we cut or go on as we were?”

  They cut, and Arthur, in partnership with Oliver, was further mollified by winning the next two rubbers, after which he announced that he – unlike some people, perhaps – had a hard day’s work ahead of him. When he had taken himself off Oliver accepted a nightcap.

  “You can’t mean what you said about businessmen,” said Francis. “They always make the most hopeless politicians. Look at Baldwin’s first Government, or the French between the wars.”

  “Of course he didn’t mean it,” said Serena. “He was pulling Arthur’s leg.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” said Oliver, sipping the excellent malt whisky, savouring the sharp tang as it slipped down his throat, the warmth in his stomach. The flames of the log fire were drawing unexpected lights from Serena’s hair.

  “Do you enjoy business?” said Francis.

  “It’s early days to say. But yes, I think I’m going to enjoy it a lot. It’s a lot like war really, and I certainly enjoyed most of that.”

  “Francis hates it,” said Serena. “He’d rather live in a cottage in Devonshire and write books.”
/>   “What about you?”

  “I’d like that too. I’d look after the garden and be secretary of the Women’s Institute and make Devonshire cream and we’d send all our children to the village school.”

  Oliver nearly said, “How many children do you propose to have?” but stopped himself in time. If ever he had seen a body made for love and childbearing it was Serena’s. There must be some trouble there. He said, “If both of you want to go, why don’t you?”

  “The usual reason,” said Francis. “Money. Any capital I’ve got is tied up in this business. It brings in a good return but I can’t get it out. So I’m stuck.”

  As Oliver walked back to pick up his car from Mr Snyder’s forecourt he wasn’t thinking about Francis and his financial troubles. He was thinking about Serena. He was wondering if it was only her face that was brown, or whether she was brown all over.

  5

  As Oliver looked round the tiny, cluttered office he felt a glow of satisfaction. Challen had cast a fine net, and had drawn in three good fish.

  There was Man Mountain McGlashan, eighteen stone of imperturbability. Oliver had once seen McGlashan lift the back end of a jeep single-handed, in deep mud, and hold it up whilst runnels were put under the wheels. There was Tom Everton, who looked like a stable lad and was the only man in the army who knew how to operate an electric razor off a No. 19 wireless set; and there – the pick of the lot – was Fred Fisher, a thin, sad cockney with a face like a long list of home-and-away defeats.

  As some men understand women, and as other men understand horses, so – and with the same mixture of passion and precision – did Fred understand the internal combustion engine. Oliver thought of him, as he had seen him once, sitting cross-legged beside a track in North Africa. A few feet behind him an armoured regiment was smashing past. White with dust, where he wasn’t black with grease, Fred was busy counting the ball bearings from a dismantled clutch-race, passing them from one hand to the other with the disinterested absorption of a Buddhist monk counting his beads during an earthquake.