The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  A considerable experience of dealing with homesick recruits had convinced him that food and drink were the answer to most human problems. He could be wrong, in which case he would have to eat and drink the stuff himself. As the taxi trundled slowly along Knightsbridge, it occurred to him that he had never known much about his daughter even when she was at home. Now that she was living on her own he knew nothing at all. Might it be possible that she had, in fact, fallen for that bearded pansy who employed her? He hoped not, but girls of her age did the strangest things. Or had Mallinson taken the initiative? Had he taken advantage of his position, and superior education, and money to seduce her? If he had, he deserved to have his bloody neck broken.

  The taxi came to a halt in a traffic block outside Harrods. Challen was suddenly conscious of being furiously hungry. He thought of starting on the veal and ham pie, but realized that he had nothing to cut it with. As he was trying to work this out, the taxi jerked forward again.

  “What do you think he’s going to do?” asked Blackett.

  “He’s bust to the wide,” said Oliver. “Don’t you agree, Wilfred?”

  “I think he must be,” said Harrap. “I had it on good authority that the bank was clamping down on his overdraft. When he’s finished paying both sets of costs he won’t have any credit left.’’

  “He hasn’t got much credit left now,” said Oliver. He was looking at the late editions of the evening papers that Naumann had brought along with him. In his summing up, Mr Justice Mee had worked in a few caustic comments about pots calling kettles black, and, since nothing more important was occupying the public mind just then, these had won a headline and a half share of the front page.

  “What can the bank do?” said Blackett. “They can squeal for their money, but if it isn’t there they can’t get it. They could put them into liquidation but that wouldn’t do them a lot of good either.”

  Oliver said, “What they’ll do is look for a purchaser. And they won’t have very far to look.”

  I could see Blackett almost licking his lips. “You mean us?” he said. “Do you think we’re big enough to do that?”

  “In business,” said Oliver, and he suddenly sounded completely sober, “you’re big enough to do anything you dare to do.”

  As soon as Jennie was safely back in her flat she had the good cry which had been threatening for the last few hours; then washed her face and restored her make-up as carefully as if she was going out for the evening, boiled a kettle and made herself a cup of Nescafe. Then she switched on the hired television set in the corner of the communal living-room, but this was suffering from a fit of the staggers, so she switched it off and put on a record of Marlene Dietrich singing “Where have all the flowers gone?” This was so sad that it made her cry again, so she switched it off, decided to change into pyjamas, and whilst she was undressing put on a saucepan of water to boil herself an egg.

  When the bell rang she knew it would be her father. She shouted out, “Hold on a moment,” flung on a dressing gown and opened the door.

  Victor Mallinson was standing outside.

  The hall outside was so dark that, for a moment, she didn’t recognize him. Then she stood staring at him.

  Mallinson said, “I’m sorry to startle you. Can I come in?” His voice sounded high and unnatural.

  Jennie said, “Well, I don’t know–”

  “I won’t keep you long.”

  “There’s no one else here.”

  Mallinson said, “No?” in a disinterested way and walked past her into the tiny hallway of the flat and through into the living-room. Jennie was about to close the front door, but thought better of it. She left it a few inches ajar and then turned round and followed Mallinson into the room.

  He was standing in front of the fireplace with his back to her. As she came in he swung round and she saw his face clearly for the first time. Its pallor was emphasized by the tiny, livid patches under the eyes. Her first thought had been that he might be drunk. Something was working powerfully in him but it wasn’t alcohol.

  He said, in the same high, flat voice, “I’m sorry to force my way in like this but I couldn’t go to bed tonight until I’d seen you. I had to find out why you did it.”

  “What–?”

  “I didn’t think I’d treated you badly. Perhaps I’d annoyed you? Upset you in some way without knowing it?”

  “Of course you hadn’t. It was simply–”

  “If I had, I can assure you it was quite unintentional.” Jennie realized that he wasn’t listening to her at all. He wasn’t even talking to her. He was arguing with himself. Arguing with his own hurt pride. She thought, “If I say anything nice to him he’s going to burst into tears. What he really needs is a doctor and a sleeping pill, or something like that. I wonder if a cup of coffee–”

  She said, “Would you like me to make you a cup of coffee?” and started towards the kitchen. The move brought her closer to him than she had intended.

  He put a hand up and grabbed her, not roughly, but very firmly by the arm. He said, “Jennie, how could you?”

  Jennie tried to pull her arm away, found that she couldn’t and gave an involuntary scream.

  It was not loud, but her father heard it at the moment when he reached the front door. He kicked it open, dropped the food and drink that he was holding, put his shoulder to the door of the sitting-room and went through it like an enraged bull carrying a locked gate on its horns.

  Then he hit Mallinson.

  The first blow, a clumsy right-hander, landed in the small of Mallinson’s back, to one side, and swung him round. The second, with the left hand, hit him in the bottom of the stomach and doubled him up, Jennie had just time to gasp out “Stop” once, when the third blow, an uppercut, with all the strength of George Challen’s shoulders behind it and all the weight of his body under it, hit Mallinson full in the throat.

  This was the blow that killed him.

  “When I was a boy at school,” said Oliver, “they used to make us go to Chapel every morning. A brisk, no-nonsense fifteen-minute service. It was like cleaning your teeth. Some of the boys used to finish off the prep they hadn’t had time to do the night before. Others used to spend the time gooping at whichever of the smaller boys in the choir they happened to be in love with at the time. One boy used to shave with an electric razor which he worked off a pocket battery. If you’d had any true religious feelings, a course of those morning services would have killed them dead.”

  “Did you ever have any religious feelings?” asked Wilfred Harrap.

  The four of us were alone in the bar. Even the barman had left us to attend to the members in the card room.

  “At the age of ten,” said Oliver, “I believed firmly in God. I confused him with my father sometimes, but that was all right because I believed in my father too.”

  Bill Blackett said, with genuine curiosity in his voice, “Do you believe in anything now?”

  “Of course I do,” said Oliver. “I believe in success.”

  As he said this he slid off the stool on which he was half perched, screwed up his face in a way which suggested that he was trying very hard to think out the answer to an insoluble problem and folded forwards on to his knees on the floor. Our discussion on religion was still running in my head, and I thought for a moment that this was a grotesque parody of prayer. Then I realized that the look on Oliver’s face was pain. He heeled slowly over, holding his chest in both hands and fighting for breath.

  Blackett started to say something about never expecting to see Oliver pass out, but Harrap was already down beside him, tearing open his coat and shirt. He said, over his shoulder, to me, “Get downstairs quick. Frank Collet is having dinner here. With any luck he won’t have left.” And to Blackett, who was still staring stupidly, “Ring the Middlesex Hospital Emergency Service. Tell them it’s a bad heart case. They’ll know what to bring.”

  The shock seemed to have driven the drink out of me. I found Collet, the heart surgeon, finishing
his coffee and blurted out the news. He put down his coffee cup carefully, rose to his feet and said, “If it’s as bad as that I can’t do much without drugs.”

  “We’ve rung the Middlesex.”

  “Right. In the upstairs bar, you say?”

  As I turned to follow him one of the club porters stopped me. He seemed to be as nearly upset about something as a good club porter can ever get. He said, “Are you with Mr Nugent’s party?”

  I thought for a moment that the ambulance might have arrived in record time, then realized that this was absurd.

  The porter said, “There’s a message for him.”

  “He can’t attend to anything now.”

  “Then perhaps you’d better take it for him, sir. It’s very urgent.” I stared at him stupidly. “It’s the police.”

  7

  Two things combined to save Oliver’s life. The fact that Collet was on the spot and the fact that his own system was chock-full of whisky. In some odd way the alcohol in the blood neutralized the blockage sufficiently to keep the heart fed until they could get him under the proper drugs.

  It was touch and go for the whole of that night. It would have been the longest and most miserable in my life if I hadn’t had too much to do to stop and think.

  I went round to the Kensington flat. I assumed that the police would be looking after George Challen, but I might be able to help Jennie. I needn’t have worried about her. She’d been taken care of by the lady who owned the house, a big, grey-haired woman who treated everyone with contempt. She had given Jennie a powerful sleeping pill and refused to let anyone into her bedroom.

  The CID Inspector turned out to be quite a sympathetic character. He had got George’s story from him. I think George expected to be arrested there and then and was quite prepared to be led off in handcuffs. The Inspector thought differently. He solemnly inspected the broken wine bottle and veal and ham pie and potato salad which were still lying messed up together in the hall where George had dropped them; and the small table which he had kicked to pieces in his whirlwind entry. He concluded that it was all pretty strong evidence that George was speaking the truth and that he really had broken in and found his daughter being assaulted. He warned George that he would be needed for enquiries and sent him home in a taxi. I think he sent one of his men to keep an eye on him, but I’m not sure. The police never react the way you think they’re going to.

  Then I went back to the hospital but wasn’t allowed to do anything useful. It was five o’clock and a morning like a dirty sheet was spreading itself over the roofs of London when I crawled into bed. I didn’t sleep much.

  That afternoon we had an emergency board meeting and started to clear up the mess. Wilfred Harrap took over as Chairman. With his City connections he was the obvious man for the job. One of the first things he did was to promote my understudy to be Secretary and ask me to join the Board. We then set about looking after George Challen. He reserved his defence in the Police Court and was committed to the Old Bailey charged with manslaughter with half a dozen other felonious homicide and grievous bodily harm charges slung in for good luck.

  Fergus Campbell briefed Starkey and we came up in front of Mr Justice Crawley, who seemed to take an instant dislike to all of us and summed up dead against George. I thought he was booked for two years at least.

  I had underestimated the British jury. We had ten men and two women, all of them middle-class and nine of them married. If Mr Justice Crawley thought they were going to let a father suffer for protecting his daughter from the lascivious attentions of her employer, then Mr Justice Crawley could think again. They closed their ears to every word of his summing up, retired long enough for a quick cigarette and came back and found the prisoner not guilty on all charges. Several of them made a point of congratulating him afterwards.

  One of the side results of the publicity attending the case was that Jennie got about forty proposals of marriage. One of the proposers, a very nice boy who played regularly at half-back for West Ham, was so persistent that she eventually said “yes”. The directors of Quinn & Nicholson gave them a canteen of cutlery.

  The next thing we had to worry about was Oliver’s stake in the Company. The doctors were quite clear that he had to retire. The trouble was that, although he was now a rich man, practically the whole of his fortune was in his large shareholding in Quinn & Nicholson. We talked about buying them ourselves, but it was going to stretch our resources to breaking point.

  Whilst we were still trying to work this out, Jacob Naumann called on us. He brought us a piece of information, and a proposition.

  The information was that he had just bought a controlling interest in Mallinsons. They had been mortally hit, first by the lawsuit going against them, then by the death of their Chairman, and finally by the bank withdrawing all support – a thing which banks do quite automatically when you need it most. I imagine that Naumann had bought Victor Mallinson’s entire holding and had then picked up other parcels of shares on the cheap until he had the whole thing in his pocket.

  His proposition was to purchase Oliver’s shares in Quinn & Nicholson, at a full and proper price, of course, and then to amalgamate the two Companies. He’d already formed Pharmaceutical & Gallenical Properties Limited, to act as holding Company.

  I don’t think that any of us were really surprised at the suggestion. It seemed an entirely logical step. When he added that he was prepared to undertake that the two Companies would continue to operate separately with only financial control at the top, I could see that it was going to go through.

  Naumann asked Wilfred Harrap to come on to the Board of the parent company, and offered me the secretaryship of the whole group. Since this would leave the Quinn & Nicholson management a bit thin on the ground he suggested that we invite Dumbo to come back. We were all glad to say “yes” to that.

  Then the lawyers got in on the act and we seemed to spend the next six months signing papers.

  I visited Oliver quite often whilst he was in hospital and afterwards when he was in a convalescent home out in Hert-fordshire. To start with he asked a lot of questions about the firm and how the various changes were working, but his interest soon cooled off. I had noticed the same thing about the war. He didn’t look back. I never once knew him attend a regimental reunion. When a thing was over it was over. It was the same with business. As soon as he realized that the curtain was down on Act Two, he started planning Act Three.

  This was to be set in Austria. Chrissie wanted to get back and Oliver thought that Steyr Engelbach was probably no longer a menace. The only news they had of him was that he kicked up such a row when the Westfälischen Company sacked him that they had to go to court to get an injunction to restrain him; and that this had so enraged him that he had to be placed under temporary restraint in a private sanatorium near Klagenfurt.

  I did a lot of the work which had to be done with the Bank of England Exchange Control Department to clear the transfer of Oliver’s money to Austria, and helped Chrissie to buy Villa Korngold. And Wilfred Harrap, Bill Blackett and George Challen went with me to Heathrow to see them off.

  We said we’d keep in touch, but I knew really that it would be occasional visits at longer and longer intervals. He was flying out of our lives.

  Postscript

  Continued and Concluded

  It took the newcomer, wheeling his bicycle, a further ten minutes to reach the Villa Korngold. We had identified him by his uniform as a member of the Felden-Gendarmerie, and by his badges, as he came closer, as a Senior Sergeant.

  He paused for a moment below the verandah, on which the three of us were breakfasting, to wipe the sweat from his broad, red forehead with a blue handkerchief and straighten his uniform cap. Then he came clumping up the steps.

  At the sight of Professor Lindt he stiffened to attention and his hand went up in a salute.

  The Professor said, “At ease, Sergeant, and tell us what brings you up this hot, steep hill.”

  The Serg
eant fumbled in the leather pouch which he carried on his belt beside his automatic pistol (and very much in the way if he had had to use it, I should have thought), and brought out a buff form. He said, “A complaint has been laid before the Superior Court at Vienna affecting Herr Nugent. It was doubted to start with whether the complaint was in order, but the court decided that, being a criminal charge deposed to by independent witnesses, it must be investigated.”

  “The charge being–?”

  The Sergeant managed to look both official and embarrassed at the same time. He said, “It is a charge of murder.”

  “Indeed. And whom has he murdered?”

  “And when?” asked Dr Hartfeldt drily.

  “It relates to an incident which took place in the month of June 1945 when Herr Nugent, then in the army, was in charge of a Prisoner-of-War Camp near Klagenfurt.”

  “So? A war crime?”

  “The court suggested that it was a war crime, but the complainant, Herr Engelbach, whose brother and one other man were alleged to have been killed, pointed out that the incident occurred after the armistice and the men concerned had reverted to civilian status. The charge was therefore one of murder of civilians and would not be affected by the amnesty for crimes committed in the course of operations of war which was promulgated last year.”

  The Sergeant said all this respectfully but firmly. Personally I was feeling sorry for him. It had been a hot and dusty climb up that hill.

  “I very much fear,” said the Professor, “that the case of Herr Nugent has been removed to a higher court even than the Superior Court at Vienna.” He looked at Dr Hartfeldt, who said, “It is true, Sergeant. Herr Nugent died last night. To be precise, at three o’clock this morning. I at once reported the matter to Professor Lindt as coroner for the City and District of Innsbruck.”

  The Sergeant saluted again and turned on his heel. Professor Lindt said, “It is courteous of you to accept my word, Sergeant. Nevertheless, I think your superiors would wish you to satisfy yourself. You may go in.”