by Joan Fleming
They had arrived at Fiery Beacon. “Which entrance?” the cabby shouted over his shoulder.
“South.” W. Sledge gave him a five-shilling tip and the cabby grinned conspiratorially before driving off. Chaps like Sledge were always his best customers.
It was drizzling slightly but with one accord they crossed over the road and leaned against the railings, staring down into the great, grey-green, greasy river, sliding evilly seawards.
“In other words,” Joe said, becoming a trifle cynical because he knew his Sledge, “in other words, you’ve done it exactly once.”
“Now, now!” Sledge reproved.
“Once,” Joe repeated firmly.
“What are you going on about?” Sledge asked. “It’s not a crime.”
“Not yet it isn’t, not yet.” And then Joe suddenly and angrily shouted: “Not yet!” and his voice, tiny and ineffectual, was carried off like a fragment of paper on the surface of the swollen river.
Being able to see practically nothing, W. Sledge took off his glasses and put them back into his pocket. He leaned, back to the railings, and ignored the river. He looked at his home, his refuge, his pad, a twenty-two story block of flats in which he lived a double life. It never ceased to amuse him that he could live his own life as householder, and brothel-keeper on the side, within a hundred air, not square, air yards of his far from loving parents who firmly believed that he shared a bachelor flat with friends in Colindale. He thought it immensely clever that he should be the tenant of the council under the name of S. Ledge. He could have thought up any number of names but the near-danger of the S. Ledge gave him immense pleasure. Number 40: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sledge. Number 102: Mr. S. Ledge.
It was, in fact, less risky than even he thought, life itself continually offering far more coincidences than fiction, such as the announcement in the obituary column of The Times of the deaths on the same day of two unrelated people called, for instance, Kipper.
The tower block carried the name of Fiery Beacon after the public house on the site on which it was partly built. The old cracked wooden sign which had swung outside the public house for two or three hundred years now hung in the council chamber, an imaginative gesture on the part of a council chairman. Before the public house there had, in fact, been a fiery beacon, lighted when there was a fog, to warn river shipping of an obstacle of sorts which had long since been removed.
Only sometimes, in certain kinds of weather and when the sun hung low over the river on a still, still evening, did it remotely resemble a fiery beacon from some distance away. At present, late at night it was an imaginary tower of the “young-Roland-to-the-dark-tower-came” kind of tower, immensely tall and immensely black, with only here and there a lighted window, pinkish, bluish or yellowish, shining through the unlined curtains. It was most people’s bedtime.
But Joe knew with a depressed certainty that it was by no means his bedtime, he knew as sure as God made little apples that he would have to do what was required of him before he went to bed because it was His Turn, and he was bound to obey. He was only thankful that he was on a late rota. This week he was not the early-morning pastry maker in the pizza bar. Talk about slavery, he thought, there’ll always be slavery. He couldn’t formulate his opinion exactly but he meant that there would always be people who were in thrall to other people, no matter how much humanity might progress. He had watched for W. Sledge too often to be able to back out of his commitments now; W. Sledge had only to go along to the police and give Joe’s name for him to be, at the very least, put on probation instantly because of past affairs. He did not want to be on probation because he had a steady job now which, though he never admitted it, he much enjoyed, and because his boss would, he thought, sack him.
He wondered wearily just how long this thraldom would last; would he still be dogsbodying for W. Sledge when he was a middle-aged man with his own thriving business and streamlined Jaguar; a much newer model than that of W. Sledge? He said humbly:
“Well, this one and that’s it.”
“How do you mean?” W. Sledge snapped.
“You know damn’ well how I mean. I’m thinking of retiring.”
“From The Wotchas?”
“Um.”
W. Sledge allowed a stream of abuse to slip out between his lips as smoothly and darkly as the river flowing below but it didn’t mean anything much and he did it automatically, without thinking what he was actually saying. He was planning. He was one who preferred to take it easy, he liked a spot of luxury, not for him the petty thief’s breathless escape from the screws, running along the top of long Kensington brick walls leading to cul-de-sacs, in his plimsolls, then flattening himself against huge black wet tree trunks trying to avoid the sweep of their powerful hand lamps.
He liked to have his car as near as possible to the job, with his chauffeur sitting patiently waiting to start off the instant he was safely inside. Besides, a car AND chauffeur was not an object of suspicion as a rule.
He drew in his surplus saliva with a long-drawn-out hiss. “This job is easy, dead easy, man. There’s nothink to it. First floor apartment, flat roof jutting out at the back, a room built on years ago, studio or something, with a skylight, man, with a skylight!” He did a few tap-dancing steps to show his pleasure. “The ladder’s hid in the shrubbery, and what a shrubbery, filthy! And as the ladder was nicked from a regular window cleaner and has his name stencilled on the side, it won’t do no harm when found leaning against the wall where I’ll leave it. And guess what?”
Joe couldn’t guess what, nor did he try.
“There’s one of these here old-fashioned tables inside the flat, you follow? glass-topped with treasure within, sheltering from the day-to-day dust.”
“Treasure?”
“Snuff-boxes, man, and other small hallmarked objects, aye-twee, they call them. This old girl’s dad or husband must have collected them and does she treasure them! Not that I had time to examine them!” He laughed raucously, “But I’ve examined others, spread out for all to see in the windows and showcases of the Bond Street dealers, Old Bond Street I should say. And in the big sale-rooms, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, for example, you can look at them close, handle them. There’s a chap watching you to see you don’t nick them mind, but you can look till your eyes fall out, there’s no harm in looking now, is there? So I know what old silver looks like, all right. I should do, by now. It’s not shiny, like new. Soft, it is, looks more like the old tins we used to have around except it’s never rusty. Tin,” he mused thoughtfully. “I’ve got so’s I can recognise it at a glance, I don’t have to squint about for the hallmark, I can see for myself what’s silver and what isn’t. Phew … uhu … Christ in spats! These snuff-boxes, I reckon there’s not a dud amongst the lot.” Somewhere about his person he found a toothpick and started to use it liberally, removing the morsels left from the pizza he had consumed a short time ago and for which he had had to pay before leaving. “Silly old trout!” he mused.
Joe leaned against the railings, holding his head in his hands, elbows on the chilly iron. He wished very much he was in bed.
“Come on, buck up, JoBo, man. The Jag’s over there, in the car park, petrol in, tyres okay.”
“You’re not going like that, I hope,” Joe fervently hoped. The rattle of his beads alone would waken the dead.
“I’m wearing my Aquascutum,” he said in an excruciatingly refined voice, “buttoned up to the neck, plenty of room in the pockets. One, just one of those snuff-boxes will fetch fifty, couldn’t fetch less. There is around a dozen at a rough guess so if I take four in each pocket, and have the goodness to leave her two, I’ll have four hundred quid or so at best,” he smiled slyly, “enough to keep you and me for a couple of weeks, eh JoBo?” He added hastily, “I don’t mean that I’m halving it, don’t get me wrong, but twenty per cent for you tonight, Jobo, just for a treat, eh?”
In the heart of darkest Kensington, not now so very dark because it was lit by blinding neon lighting whic
h replaced the old hanging brackets but made it difficult to see anything at all clearly, the block of flats was red brick and the entrance was a baroque stone canopy over double half-glass swing doors. Large letters on one of the stone pillars proclaimed the numbers 1—30.
The Jaguar, driven by a young chauffeur in a peaked cap, slid to a stop; it was five minutes to one a.m.
“She’ll wake up, of course, unless she’s doped herself with the sleeping tablets the doctor’s given her, like a lot of these old things do, nowadays. But sure enough she’ll sleep with her bedroom door locked and if she hears anything she’ll put her head under the bedclothes and pray.”
“And what?”
“Pray!”
“You’d better watch it,” Joe murmured sullenly, “you’re too bloody confident, if you ask me, too cocky by a long chalk.”
Mr. W. Sledge was pulling on expensive, well-fitting black antelope gloves from a Jermyn Street glovers. “Yew-man nature is what you’ve got to study,” he advised, “you can’t get nowhere if you don’t know how people tick,” he hissed into Joe’s actual earhole so, for the moment, Joe was engaged in cleaning out his earhole and omitted to wish him luck. Sledge vanished, not through the entrance door which would, at that time of night, be locked, but between the building and the surrounding hedge and, presumably, round the back.
Joe took off the chauffeur’s cap which he had worn before without knowing that the “badge” on the front was a coronet and that Sledge had “acquired” it from the chauffeur of a peer-of-the-realm in a public house not far from the House of Lords. He examined the greasy mark on the lining, as he had done before, and found that others must have worn it, because last time he used it, it had resembled the map of Ireland but was becoming more shapeless with the passage of time.
Ireland … his mother was at present there, at a little town in the south called Ballyhoola where her son-in-law was a vet, and she was due back at any moment. She had been attending the birth of her first grandchild, which had unexpectedly turned out to be two, thus prolonging her visit.
“Uncle Joe!” he said aloud to try the sound, “Uncle Joe!”
He was completely relaxed, one of the attractions of the friendship of W. Sledge was that he inspired confidence and freedom from constraint in his employees. Joe felt rather less tension than the wearer of the peaked hat might have felt were he waiting for the peer-of-the-realm to come out of the dentist, much less, in fact, because the peer’s chauffeur would have been worried about such things as meters and meter-wardens.
He did not, as anyone in a state of even mild anxiety might have done, follow W. Sledge in his mind:
(1) The slipping round the back: 1 minute.
(2) Finding the ladder and putting it into position, 1/2 minute.
(3) Climbing ladder, 6 seconds.
(4) Covering small area on skylight with coating of putty, 1/2 minute.
(5) Pressing glass till it broke and picking out as much as possible without letting any fall inside, if poss., 1 minute.
(6) Gripping bar, opening skylight wide enough for entry, getting in, 1/2 minute at most.
(7) Dropping lightly down, making bee-line for living-room, unlocking living-room door (always locked on hall side by old ladies living alone), closing it, pressing-in glass on table top with cushion. Bringing fountain-pen-size torch out of pocket to illuminate snuff-boxes, 1 minute.
(8) Picking snuff-boxes out from amongst bits of broken glass, 2 minutes if selective.
(9) Looking round to see if anything left in the way of identification (as if there could be!), split second.
(10) Nipping out at the speed of sound, closing front door of flat quietly with the utmost caution, 2 seconds.
(11) Descending stairs, 10 seconds.
(12) Coping with inside main door catches, 10 seconds.
(13) Shutting front door quietly.
Operation complete in ten minutes and Bob’s your uncle.
It was a quarter-of-an-hour, in fact, but Joe was so interested in the new idea of being an uncle that though he had the engine running for a good eight minutes he had not even begun to wonder if anything had gone wrong when W. Sledge reappeared. He started off even before Sledge had shut the door with a quiet clunk.
“I’m an uncle, I forgot to tell you,” he said chattily, as they moved off: “I’ve twin nieces; they’re Irish, my sister married a vet who’s a marvellous jockey, beat that! He’s an Irish amateur, came over for the Grand National. But two nieces at once—eh?”
“Shut up about your effing relations …”
Startled, Joe glanced sideways at his friend W. Sledge, who had lost his usual fairly good-natured aplomb and was being sick through his gloved fingers and on to the rubber mat between his feet, splashing vilely his pointed-toed, elastic-sided boots. Alarmed now, Joe stopped the car and stared helplessly at the mess.
He began to feel rather ill himself, there were sensations such as he had never experienced in the region of his heart, not so much a pain as certain jiggings about which had the effect of making him breathless. He became slightly dizzy, his mouth dried up, he began to shiver. He felt as he might have done if he had arrived in another country, travelling in something much faster than the Concorde; he had arrived conscious but with nothing but fear, the horrible metallic taste of fear in his mouth.
“You’ve killed her!” He knew suddenly all about the fragility of old ladies, how easily they died, how easily anyone died, in fact, if they were subjected to too great physical stress. How vile, how vile it was, he realised, to manhandle an old lady, like playing catch-as-catch-can with a piece of valuable china. How stupid, how senseless, how absolutely non-okay.
He knew all about Sledge’s violent temper too, about how he sometimes tortured cats. He was wise, suddenly he knew and felt everything with a kind of uncanny out-of-this-world sensitivity. In your ordinary senses you would never kill an old lady, not unless you were a monster of sorts, but fear might make you, fear of being caught, like animal fear on the edge of being trapped.
He thought of Silas d’Ambrose and the contempt his boss would have of anything botched so disgustingly; he could see the expression on his face, that fastidious repugnance.
He thought of how he ought to have warned W. Sledge: “Don’t do the old lady any harm!” he might have said, but how out-of-tune it would have been, how gauche, clumsy and not okay at all; Sledge would have jeered at any such advice from Joe. “What do you take me for, a thug?” he might have said: “Come off it!”
“What are you stopping for?” Sledge grumbled.
There was nothing he wished to say, no comment he could make aloud; he put the car into gear and slid away from the kerb; for a moment he could not remember where they were and drove mindlessly forward but soon he had to stop at the busy, winding Kensington Church Street, and remembered. He turned south and drove slowly and carefully back home. On the rough ground where the Fiery Beacon’s cars were parked he stopped, took off his chauffeur’s cap and stowed it away under the seat. He turned and looked at his companion; their faces were greenish in the neon lighting. W. Sledge jerked his head, meaning “get out,” and this Joe did. He stood watching Sledge struggling over the gear-lever into the driving seat. He thought: Surely he’s not going to drive off without a word?
No, he wasn’t; he rolled down the window, his face near Joe’s: he looked ghastly. He said: “Be seein’ you,” and drove off. Never in Joe’s experience had W. Sledge said less.
CHAPTER II
JOE’S FATHER, when Joe was at the age of nine, from being a fine footballer (playing half-back for Fulham football team one year) had become an immobile mass of flesh, a victim of multiple sclerosis which had started in a small way but spread with alarming speed so that in a matter of weeks he was unable to use his legs and then his arms. He had spent months in hospitals and had had every new form of treatment tried upon him until finally he had settled for living at home and being looked after by his family, helped by relays of home he
lps and district nurses. From their tiny house in a part of Chelsea which had since become smart, they were allocated a fine, almost penthouse, flat in the new tower block beside the river towards Battersea. There, by the window, on the twenty-first and top floor, his father would sit all day in the wheel chair in which he could not even propel himself into another room. There was still some movement in his hands and lower arms, and he was able to do crossword puzzles, play chess and read the papers, to feed himself (just) and to turn the radio on and off. Two nurses came at night to put him to bed and again in the morning to get him up, to wash and dress him and lift him about.
His wife was a part-time assistant in a department store within easy walking distance and on weekday mornings the meals-on-wheels service would bring hot food for the invalid. It would seem that on the whole he found life worth living, he took a keen interest in the doings of his family, would listen eagerly for his wife’s return from work, would comment in a lively manner on the day’s events, however minute, and never grumbled about his condition.
His family, wife, son and daughter would store up the day’s tiny happenings and relate them when they came home. He had, for instance, been immensely pleased when Joe had repeated the conversation he had had with his boss regarding his Huguenot origins, it had kept his father happy and chuckling for days. It is possible that the continued presence of this tragedy endowed the family with a certain kindness and concern for others that they might not other-wise have had.
Thus it was not out of character that Joe, as he ascended in the lift, should begin to worry about his father. There were so many things that had had to be explained to him, pizzas, for instance, because they were unknown in England about the time his father became immobile.