The End Game

by Michael Gilbert

  “His words shall be as gospel to me.”

  Ronald Cheverton said, “You’re Welsh, aren’t you? That means you’ve the gift of the gab. See you use it. The people you’ll be looking after are mostly middle-class and respectable. Maybe the first time they’ve ever been abroad. They like being talked to.”

  “Perhaps a funny story, every now and then.”

  “As long as it’s funny,” said Bob.

  “And clean,” said Ronald.

  “Next thing. We’ve got the routine for the paperwork lined up. All you have to do is follow the rules.” He indicated a bag standing beside the desk. David had noticed it when he came in. It was made of black leather, a solid, heavy job with a steel locking bar along the top and two handles.

  “That’s your baby. You don’t let it out of your sight by day and lock it up in your room at night. It carries all the passports, all the tickets and reservations and a float of exactly a hundred quid in cash for emergencies. Also, it’s got your log book. Every day you write down in it how the trip’s gone. Notes about the accommodation. Notes of complaints. Things like that. You get me?”

  “I get you.”

  “When you arrive back after a trip, you come straight in here, as soon as you get off the coach, and you hand in that bag.”

  “So you can see the cash is still there,” said David with a grin.

  “So we can see everything’s there,” said Bob unsmiling. “The cash is the least important. You lose someone’s passport, and there’ll be hell to pay. All right. Any questions so far?”

  “When do I get paid?”

  “You get two weeks’ pay when you get back.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Tomorrow. At nine o’clock.”

  David stopped on the way out to have a word with Paula. He said, “I’ve got the job. That calls for a celebration.”

  “Meaning you and me?”

  “Who else, lovely. When do you get away?”

  “Half past five.”

  “Meet you at Henekeys, in High Holborn, at six.”

  “I might be there,” said Paula.

  “That’s the girl.”

  “Just look at those cows,” said Mrs Fairbrass. Being French cows, they were different and, even after three days of travel, were still exciting.

  “What do you suppose that building on the hill up there is?” said Miss Prothero. “It looks as if it ought to be a church, but isn’t it an odd shape!”

  The bus was negotiating the twisting road which skirts the northern foothills of the Pyrenees.

  “That, ladies, is a Mormon chapel,” said David.

  “Mormons,” said Miss Prothero. “What an idea. I don’t believe they allow Mormons in France. Do they, Mr Collings?”

  Collings was concentrating on his driving. He was a middle-aged man with a face like an on-course bookmaker and a useful pair of shoulders on him. He grunted and said that they allowed anything in France.

  “Indeed, France is very tolerant of strange religions,” said David. “You’ll find more chapels and tabernacles and meeting houses in a French village than you will in a village in Wales. And, believe me, ladies, that’s saying something.”

  “What sort of religions?” said Miss Prothero suspiciously.

  “Anabaptists, Second Adventists, White Mohammedans, Fifth Monarchy Men, Druids.”

  “Now really, Mr Morgan,” said Mrs Fairbrass. “The others I might swallow, but I can’t swallow Druids. He’s not telling the truth, is he, Mr Collings?”

  “All Welshmen are liars,” said Collings.

  It had been an agreeable trip so far, starting with a smooth Channel crossing and two days of sunshine. Rayhome Tours believed in taking things easy. Late starts, short runs, good meals. From David’s point of view the only difficulty he could foresee was how he was going to fill in his spare time.

  He expressed this thought to Collings that evening in a hotel in the outskirts of Pau. They were sharing a double bedroom, as they always did.

  “Depends what you want,” said Collings. He had been shaving and was now dabbing after-shave lotion on to his chin and neck. “Me, I usually go and find a woman.”

  “In a respectable town like this?”

  “You can find a woman anywhere if you know where to look. Cost you about a hundred francs.”

  “I’ll have to wait till I get paid before I go in for anything like that.”

  Collings completed his toilet and paused at the door to say, “Watch that bag. Better lock it in that cupboard and lock the door when you go out.”

  David regarded the bag with disfavour. He said, “What I’d have done would be hand it over to the hotel office and forget about it.”

  “Orders are, don’t let it out of your sight by day. Lock it up in your room at night. Don’t trust hotel safes. First place a thief would make for.”

  Standing at the window, David watched Collings padding off down the street. He thought that if he was a girl he wouldn’t fancy a bout with Collings. There was a dangerous and disturbing animal quality about him.

  “Well, da, it’s not you who’s got to share his attentions,” he said. “Now let’s have a look at you.” He unlocked the black bag and tipped the contents out on to the bed. Passports, tickets, a thick folder of correspondence with hotels and a number of brochures. The log book in which he had not yet got round to making an entry. An unsealed brown envelope which contained bank notes.

  David took them out and counted them. They were new notes and tended to stick together, making counting difficult. It took him two recounts to confirm that what he had was not a hundred pounds, but one hundred ten. He looked thoughtfully at the money before returning it all to the envelope.

  He went across to his own case and took out, from underneath the clothes, a finely graduated steel rule and the sort of spring balance with a hook on the bottom that fishermen use for weighing their catch. Placing the black bag empty on the chest of drawers, he first weighed it carefully. Then he measured its depth, inside and outside, and repeated the process, measuring it across, in two places, from side to side.

  “Tried and acquitted on all counts,” said David. He had been suspicious of the bag from the moment he saw it and would not have been surprised to find that it had a false bottom or double sides with concealed pockets in them. Apparently not so.

  He replaced the contents, relocked the bag, locked it in the wall cupboard, pocketed both keys and went out, locking the door behind him.

  At Grasse Mrs Fairbrass and Miss Prothero, who had struck up a holiday friendship with her, were discussing their new courier.

  “Nicer than the last one,” said Miss Prothero.

  This was undeniable. His predecessor, David gathered, a man called Watterson, had been morose, monosyllabic and, by the end of the trip, almost permanently drunk.

  “I think he’s very nice,” said Mrs Fairbrass. “My late husband came from Dolgelly. It’s a pleasure to hear a Welsh voice.”

  “He certainly does a lot of talking.”

  “And those stories he tells.”

  “A bit near the knuckle, some of them. That one about the Baptist minister and the budgerigar.”

  “You laughed as loudly as anyone.”

  “It was funny, the way he told it.”

  “I think he’s a most unusual man,” said Mrs Fairbrass. “There’s something about him. It’s difficult to explain. As though there’s more in him than meets the eye.”

  “Depths within depths.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we ask him out to dinner tonight?”

  “Go to a restaurant, you mean,” said Miss Prothero, mentally counting her spare cash.

  “I’ll pay,” said Mrs Fairbrass. “I’ve brought plenty of money.”

  “All right. Let’s ask him. It’ll be a change from the hotel.”

  Mr Morgan expressed himself as charmed by the invitation, and the three of them spent a very pleasant evening. By the end of it he knew a lot about them an
d had given them an interesting account of his own youth in the valleys. It appeared that his father had been a miner and that he, David, had succeeded, due to the coaching of a devoted schoolmistress, in winning a scholarship to Oxford.

  “How did it go?” said Bob Cheverton.

  “All right,” said Collings. “He was a great hit with the pussies.”

  “In other ways, I mean.”

  “Okay so far. At least he’s honest. I gave him every chance to help himself to a couple of fivers.”

  “That’s something, I suppose. And he seems to have written up his log all right.” He was flicking through the book, page after page covered by Morgan’s scrawling writing. “What’s all this about trouble at Dijon?”

  “That was on the way back. They tried to overcharge us. They tried to land us with the full tariff, when they’d agreed to demi-pension.”

  Collings, who was no French scholar, pronounced this last word as though it was something his employers were going to pay him when he retired.

  “But you sorted it out.”

  “Morgan sorted it out. He told the proprietor exactly where he got off.”

  “In English or French?” said Ronald Cheverton, looking up for the first time from some papers he was studying.

  “Oh, in French.”

  “Pretty fluent, I suppose.”

  “The proprietor seemed to understand it all right.”

  Ronald Cheverton said, “Hmm,” and returned to his reading.

  “He’ll be waiting for his pay packet,” said Bob. “Do we keep on with him?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Ronald. “We’ll give him a dry run to Italy and make our minds up after the next French trip.”

  Later that evening, in Henekeys bar, David said, “Big celebration tonight. We’ll have a couple of drinks here and then go on and have a slap-up dinner.”

  “They must pay you better than they do me,” said Paula.

  “It’s not the pay. It’s the perks.”

  “What perks?”

  “They liked their courier so much they had a whip-round at the end. Forty-five pounds. Ten of them from Mrs Fairbrass, bless her old heart. Who said Yorkshire people were close with their brass?”

  They had two drinks and then one more and went to a restaurant in Soho and had a couple of drinks while waiting for their meal. Paula had a hard head, for a girl, but she was loosening up by the time they were halfway through a large flask of Val Policella.

  “It’s all right for us wage slaves,” said David, “but I’m damned if I know how Ronald and Bob do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make a living out of it. I know what the customers paid for this trip and I know what the accommodation cost. Add in the petrol for the coach and the cross-Channel tickets and pay for me and Collings and there can hardly be twopence left for them.”

  “I expect they get a rake-off from the hotels.”

  “Could be. I know someone who gets a rake-off and that’s Mike Collings. He chooses the places we stop for our midday meal. Must be worth a tenner a time to him.”

  “He gives me the creeps,” said Paula. “He’s like one of those people on the telly. As soon as he comes on, the music goes ‘twang’ and you know he’s a baddy.”

  But her mind wasn’t on Collings. It was fully engaged in the tantalising problem that David Rhys Morgan presented. He was a grand talker. Was he also a doer? In short, was she going to end the evening alone in her bed, or with him in his?

  She need not have worried.

  10

  “And this,” said Martin Brandreth, “is the print shop. You won’t have anything to do with it, not directly, but it’s a good thing for my secretary to know what goes on at the sharp end.”

  It was a huge room, lit from above and on three sides by big windows. It was full of a bewildering variety of machinery which Susan later identified as the Roland Parva, the Roland Ultra and the Roland Favourit, the Kords, the Smart Densitometer, the Muller-Martini Trimmer Stitcher and the Krause-Wohlenberg Guillotine.

  “We’re one of the best-equipped outfits in the South of England. We can tackle anything from a pocket-sized brochure to a six-by-eight poster. Basic red, black, yellow and blue, but any number of combinations and shades. The client chooses the exact mix. Just like when you buy clothes in a shop. You pick out the colours you want before they start designing the dress.”

  He led the way through the clattering room to an apparatus of gleaming steel and blue glass. Susan was doing her best to take in the information which was being tossed at her, but was really more interested, at that moment, in the people who were operating the machines.

  Her father, who had been a soldier, had once said to her,

  “If you want to find out whether it’s a good regiment, watch the men when the Colonel goes on a tour of inspection.”

  Judged by this, it did not seem to be an entirely happy outfit. The men answered up when Brandreth spoke to them, but they proffered no information, and she had yet to see one of them smile.

  The young man who seemed to be in charge of this particular machine stood back as they approached. He had carroty hair, worn rather long, and the pale, freckled face which goes with hair of that colour.

  Brandreth said to him, “Well, Simon. How is it going?” and turned away as he said it, giving the impression that he either anticipated a routine response or was not really interested in what it turned out to be.

  When the young man said nothing at all, Brandreth swung round on him. He said, “Something up?”

  “I’d rather you talked to Mr Lambie about it, sir.”

  The “sir” came after an interval long enough to make it sound not only reluctant, but offensive.

  Susan had noticed a white-haired man hovering near the machine, who took this as a cue to advance.

  “Something wrong, Lambie?”

  “I’d prefer to discuss it in the office.”

  “As you like.”

  When Susan hesitated, he said, “You’d better come along too. Lambie is the father of the Chapel. He’s the most important man here. Much more important than me. I’m just the mug who signs the pay checks.”

  He led the way out of the print shop and up to the next floor. The works had been built on a sloping piece of ground, and when they had climbed the stairs and made their way to the front of the building they were still on street level.

  The front office was busy with clacking typewriters. Brandreth’s suite of offices was at the far end. A conference room, a small outer room for Susan, then Brandreth’s private sanctum. It was like a self-contained flat. There was even a tiny bathroom. Brandreth paused in the conference room, as if making up his mind whether to go any farther. Then he pulled back the chair at the head of the table, plumped himself down in it and gestured to Susan and Mr Lambie to be seated. Everything he did, Susan decided, was based on the idea of how a top man ought to act. It would have been more convincing if it had been less self-conscious.

  “Well, Lambie,” he said. “What is it?”

  “It’s Simon Wales.”

  “That much I did grasp. What does he want? More money?”

  “No, sir. He wants an assistant.”

  There was a thick, red-covered, thumb-indexed book on the table. Lambie had a copy of the same book with him. Both men opened their books together and found the place they were looking for. Just as though they were going to sing a duet, thought Susan.

  “He’s within his rights, you know,” said Lambie. “That machine rates two operators.”

  “I can read,” said Brandreth. “If it rates an assistant, why hasn’t he got one?”

  “He did have. Young Ward. Went off to join his father in a newsagent’s business end of last month. You remember?”

  “I thought we’d got a replacement.”

  “We advertised for one. But the earliest anyone could come was beginning of June.”

  “Well, okay. Tell him he’ll have his assistant. In three weeks’ time.”


  “He says he wants him now.”

  “For God’s sake!” said Brandreth, losing all hold of a temper which had been slipping for some minutes. “What is this place? A bloody nursery. Does everyone want their hand held by someone else? He can have an assistant in three weeks’ time. Until then he’s got to work the bloody machine by himself.”

  “He won’t do it, sir.”

  “Then put someone on the machine who will.”

  “If we start moving people from their jobs on to other jobs, we really shall be in for trouble. Like as not, they’ll all walk out.”

  “Then shut that machine down for three weeks and send Wales on holiday.”

  “What about the Golden Apple job?”

  There was a long and brittle silence.

  Finally Brandreth jerked back his chair, jumped to his feet and started to walk up and down. Someone had left a box-file on the floor beside the table. Brandreth kicked it so hard that it flew open and all the papers spilled out on to the carpet. Mr Lambie watched him impassively. When the exercise had worked some of the steam out of him, Brandreth sat down again and said, “Suppose you make a helpful suggestion for a change. You’re meant to be impartial.”

  “It’s difficult. We might offer him a large bonus. On the grounds that he’ll be doing two people’s work for the next three weeks.”

  “Blackmail.”

  “In a way.”

  “And another thing.” Brandreth was leafing through the book on the table which Susan was now able to see was called the Printing Industries Annual. “There are three other machines where the rules say that the operator may have an assistant i/the work justifies it. You can bet your bottom dollar, if those three lads hear that Wales has been paid a bonus, they’ll all ask for an assistant, or a large bonus if they don’t get one.”

  “It’s more than likely,” said Mr Lambie stolidly.

  Susan watched Brandreth curiously. He was up against a brick wall, and no one was going to help him to climb it. He seemed to realise this, because he sat back and said, “All right, Lambie. I’ll have to think about it. Tell Wales I’ll give him an answer by the end of the week. He can carry on for three days, surely.”