Young Man, I Think You're Dying

by Joan Fleming

  The receiver lived in one of those streets the houses of which seem only to be a façade because no one is ever seen to be entering or leaving, looking out of the windows, or having things delivered; red brick, they have pale stone facings with simple carvings on the cornices; they have the same colour of unlined curtains in every window in the house, and where at one time there was an aspidistra, now there is a vase of flowers. The acme of respectability.

  W. Sledge knew better than to stop at the front door; he left the car at the end of the street and walked down the lane behind the houses, the way the milkmen went. Through the hedge he could see the light on in the house he wanted, the receiver was expecting him, he had been warned by telephone earlier in the day.

  He sold his evening’s takings to the elderly retired man who had been for most of his lifetime a porter at a big London auctioneers and knew the business “backwards”; knew the antique dealers to whom he could sell the stuff, too. He kept one thing back, he did not know why, it was the tiger’s tooth.

  Though he came away with his pocket-book pleasantly full his nerves were still jangling. He knew he must sell the car, which had served him well but which he must part with because he had had it long enough for it to be associated with him even by someone who wasn’t observant. “Yes,” anybody who knew him would agree, “W. Sledge has this dark green Jag.”

  It would have to go … and quickly. But first he went to his flat where he was again sick. He did not stay long. Amrita was uneasy, he left after having a bit of a rest in his sitting-room.

  Unfortunately the firm who would buy it, who dealt in cars with a shady past, would not be open for business till eight o’clock. This garage was situated in a wilderness of similar establishments on the Southend Road; they had a piece of empty ground the size of four tennis-courts on which the cars were lined up with the price written in white paint on the windscreen, the whole surrounded by a string of gay coloured electric-light bulbs. It remained floodlit all night, too, so that the night-watchman could see if any pilfering were taking place.

  Since sleep was not possible, he drove straight there and walked up and down the lines of cars, rejecting each one in his mind until dawn came and he could go a few yards down the road to a good pull-up for car men, where he had breakfast and began to feel better. He had a chat about cars with an articulated-truck driver who said he was saving up for a Rover 2000.

  The salesman, who knew him well and had sold him the Jag, was perfectly prepared to take it back on part exchange and no questions asked.

  “There’s nothing in that lot I want,” Sledge said with an almost audible sneer towards the lines of cars displayed.

  “What do you fancy, then?” the salesman asked with biting sarcasm, “a Porsche, eh?”

  “A Rover 2000!”

  “He he he!” giggled the salesman, “settling down, are you? Looking for something class?”

  “I told you what I want,” Sledge returned sternly.

  “Don’t make me laugh, I’ve got a cracked lip,” the salesman begged. He sobered up almost at once because the boss arrived and immediately offered Sledge his own Rover 2000; it had done a big mileage but the engine number had been successfully eliminated and there were new number-plates available. It was a treat of a car, he said, responds to the touch like a glorious sexy bird, Cleopatra couldn’t do no better.

  The hocus pocus and abracadabra over insurance and log book would make an interesting handbook of the Hints to Conjurors variety (All Done With Mirrors): it took time, however, and finally, after a lapse of several hours, W. Sledge drove back westwards, the owner of a different car from the one in which he had driven down the Southend Road; dead white and by no means the burglar’s favourite make. It was a bold stroke and his first (alas, his only) move up the social ladder.

  It was a gruelling day though, waiting for the news to break and when final editions of the evening papers appeared, though he had been expecting it, the news of the Kensington widow’s cruel death almost winded him with shock.

  With a tankful of petrol he had been driving about all day, not going anywhere he was known; trying out his car on the M1; having a meal at Luton, then back to London and round and round Regent’s Park, past the Zoo three times, hoping to catch the eye of a “bird,” but there were few people about on foot.

  Finally, the evening paper … and then there was no time to be lost.

  CHAPTER VI

  RECEIVERS who are not to be trusted are no good to anybody; but receivers have their own ethics and their own rules and these they make clear to their clients before taking them on, if they have any sense or pride. This particular elderly receiver in Walham Green had worked for many years as the trusted employee of a famous auctioneer but he had not failed to observe the awful crooks some apparently impeccable dealers were; clever as a bag of monkeys, he would say, they always got away with it. So in his retirement this old porter got his own back on all the years of watching other people’s successful, adroit manoeuvring and did a quiet overnight business in relieving burglars of their loot and re-selling it to very okay customers.

  “But armed robbery or robbery with violence and you’ve had it,” he would say over and over again to his feeders, making quite sure they did not forget it or think that over the years he had relaxed the rule. He could not and would not put up with any hint of violence whatsoever, he did not like it.

  He did not buy an evening paper but he saw the details of the Kensington murder next morning all right. It wasn’t the first time he had gone to the nearest police station; they knew him and had a strange relationship with him because he had been immensely useful to them in the past.

  There was a kind of involuted code of honour between them; in exchange for their not actually asking questions of him, he might give them any information he had regarding armed robberies and violence. He disposed of his purchases so very quickly, within hours, so the actual goods were never on his premises for long and an arrest wasn’t possible unless stolen goods were found in his possession. The police knew neither his name nor his address but they could easily have found it out had they wished. They trusted him to come to them if there were any violence suspected. Furthermore they knew that he dealt only in small stuff; anything as big as a tankard or a teapot was out.

  The receiver did not know either W. Sledge’s name or his address but W. Sledge, upset as he was, had made a small mistake when he had called; he had unaccountably taken off the dark raincoat he was wearing in order to empty the pockets which were weighing him down, and the receiver had observed his attire with great interest: the tight trousers, the orange-coloured thin polo-necked sweater, the thick fisherman’s knit pullover … and above all, the strings of beads hanging round his neck. Lots of young men wore beads, everybody knew, but the receiver had thought it a damn’ silly thing to go on a robbery with all that junk round your neck: suppose one of the strings had broken, been left upon the scene of the crime?

  “Too clever by half, I hope you get him, he’s a cocky youngster,” the receiver ended, and the Chief Inspector courteously called him Sir when he thanked him as the old man left his office, even though he had told him nothing about the articles received but simply offered a description of a young man’s appearance in a possible connection with the Kensington murder.

  “Dad?”

  Pa Bogey slept so lightly that he seemed never to be asleep. “Yes, son?” He pressed the bedside light switch which lay in bed alongside him so that little movement was necessary to turn it on. Joe blinked at the sudden light; he went over to the window, looking down on the mist-shrouded space which was river, his back to his father so that his face was not visible to the prostrate man.

  “When’s Mum coming back?”

  ‘Should have been today, I was expecting a tinkle all evening. I hope nothing’s gone wrong.”

  Joe ran his tongue round his dry lips; in taking his father into his confidence he was doing the inconceivable; he had been driven to it for reasons whic
h he deplored in himself, motives for which he was ashamed; they did not fit in with his idea of himself, a tough-guy.

  “It’s like this …” In a spasmodic series of gasps and gulps, of hesitations and evasions, he managed to get it out.

  There was a kid, a girl that is, in trouble, derelict, no not derelict … destitute, that was it, destitute. Nowhere to go, not a penny piece to her name; last night … it had been late, too late to disturb him, he’d, that is, he’d borrowed Mum’s bed to put her in, like, just for the night. But now tonight she was still around. As Mum hadn’t come home … that is, like … he thought it a good idea to put her in Mum’s bed again.

  This, Pa Bogey assured him, was quite okay. He did not add that he knew perfectly well that Mum’s bed had been occupied the night before and that it was his opinion that it had been occupied by Joe as well … however …

  Joe was having great difficulty in conveying what he wished to convey, he wasn’t used to taking his father into his confidence, in fact it was the very last thing he wished to do but there was no other way out of it.

  This evening he had taken the girl to the pizza bar and it had been agreed with Silas d’Ambrose that she should act as assistant, probationer as Silas called it, in the bar for a nominal (again Silas’s word) wage, for the time being. That so-called nominal wage was not enough to keep her anywhere in London, so … if she could stay here, with the Bogeys, for a short period, it would be a great help.

  “Yes, son, I daresay your Mum would agree.”

  He did not ask where Joe would sleep when Mum was home again and Joe knew that the true answer hung upon that question.

  “I can doss down in the living-room,” he mumbled.

  “You wouldn’t be having her in your bed, then,” his father murmured thoughtfully, a statement rather than a question.

  “She’s not that kind of girl.”

  “Cripes!” his father exclaimed, taken by surprise (saying afterwards, unrealistically, that you could have knocked him down with a “fevver”). “What do you call her then?”

  “Frances Smith.”

  “Sweet Fanny Adams,” his father murmured thoughtfully, and Joe got the message. He felt a sudden, horrifying, irresistible rush of emotion.

  But not on any account was Joe’s Dad going to ask another question, to have done so would have been to break the spell. Parents would always ask questions and that was where they went wrong, in Joe’s Dad’s opinion. He very much wanted to know where Miss Frances Smith now was; since it was well after midnight, he felt almost certain she was already in Mrs. Bogey’s bed but he said nothing and whistled very faintly through his teeth as he used to when his hands were occupied in work of some kind and he wished it to be known that he couldn’t care less what had been, or was being, told him. So Joe told him all the rest of it.

  He stared up at the ceiling, still whistling faintly, and let the flood pour over him.

  There was a long pause after Joe had finished. The boy had turned to face him as he had been talking, and now he was resting his behind on the edge of the window-sill, his back to the marvellous night view.

  Joe’s father had not always been as clever and wise; but as he always reminded himself, it’s the handicapped folk who manage to achieve what they would not have otherwise done, like the man without hands who carves the Lord’s Prayer on a walnut. He that overcometh … Joe’s Dad had had a long time to do nothing but think and if his body was entirely useless, his brain and mind were not. He had worked out a philosophy of his own.

  He said: “Well, Joe, you’ve got yourself in a real old hash but it is what was to be expected; you’ve only followed the trend. This may not be the first time you’ve bust the law, not by a long chalk, but it’ll be the first time you’ve been, or are going to be, found out, bound to be, as I see it, they’ll catch up on young Sledge and he’s not going to shield you, that’s for sure!”

  The kindness of his tone was somehow unbearable; Joe prayed that he was not going to cry, though he was very near it; he sniffed loudly a great many times and thus kept his cheeks dry.

  “It’s obvious what you’re going to do, this time, son, eh?”

  Joe nodded, wordless.

  “You were an … what they call, accessory. If you’d set out with a gun, or if he’d set out with a gun, to do that robbery and the old lady had got herself shot: well, I reckon you’d be in it as bad as young Sledge. But I can’t help thinking there’s a chance, that as you didn’t set out with guns, you may be all right, you I mean, not Sledge. What did you say, Joe?”

  He had made a croaking sound which had something to do with the word loyalty.

  “Yes,” his father agreed, “ ‘Honour amongst thieves’ but it don’t say anything about ‘honour among murderers,’ do it?”

  He began to feel much better, having told his father everything was a blessed relief, somehow or other; he almost felt that perhaps he was going to struggle out of this mess-up still himself, if a different one in that he would not be in any way attached to W. Sledge and his gang in future.

  “There’s just one thing,” he said slowly, and even his voice had changed, “what’s going to happen when I go to the police,” he jerked his head, “to her?”

  “I’d have to have a look at her before I could say.”

  “I mean … when I go to the police tomorrow … they might keep me there; she’ll have to know where I am and all that, otherwise she might think I’d stood her up, eh?”

  Joe’s Dad was frowning, not sure how to reply. He was certain she was a bitch of a girl, predatory and probably pregnant. Joe surprised him by saying, as though he were throwing a final spanner in the works:

  “She’s not our class.”

  His Dad made such a wry face that Joe could not help smiling.

  “Up, not down!” he said. “Her Dad’s a Lord somethink or other.”

  “A lord?”

  “Not exactly, he don’t sit in the House of Lords, he’s a plain Mister but with a … that is, he has two names and he’s called by both and he’s a big gun in the county, sort of thing.”

  “That makes a lot of difference, I suppose …”

  “Aye, it does,” Joe returned with feeling, “she’s got to be treated proper.”

  “I see,” his Dad returned, though bewildered.

  Joe said there was something else he had better tell him; his Dad had had just about as much as he could take for one go but said, “Go on, chum!”

  “Sledge has what he calls an establishment of his own.”

  “Oh, yea?”

  “He has a flat of his own and he keeps an Indian mistress, very smooth, has done for pretty near two years. She … he sends chaps to her, daytime, get it?”

  “Part-time prostitute?”

  Joe nodded soberly.

  Joe’s Dad clicked his tongue as though it was a pity. “It was better when it was on the streets, open and above board, the good old prostitute mincing along Shaftesbury Avenue with a tiny dog, her bum wagging from side to side … oh, for the good old days!”

  Joe looked disapproving, even slightly shocked.

  “The thing is, Dad, you’ve got to know this, since you’re getting to know the lot. It’s here!”

  “How do you mean, here?”

  “Here in this block of flats. Fiery Beacon.”

  “Get away!”

  “It’s over the other side, north entrance, seventeenth floor, looking out over Hampstead way … He’s got it in the name of S. Ledge …”

  Joe’s Dad couldn’t laugh properly, he made the choking rather sad sound denoting laughter and Joe waited calmly till it was over.

  “Such a pity, such a pity,” Joe’s Dad gasped at last, “all that skill gone to waste.”

  “It’s not gone to waste. Dad, he’s making a good income, two thousand this year shouldn’t wonder, tax-free; it’s the chaps that work for themselves that makes the money, I know that for sure. If I didn’t know that I’d never of had nothink to do with Sledge.”
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  “You’re not working for yourself if you’re working for Sledge.”

  “No, but don’t you see? That rake-off I get every time I help him, it’s all saving up.”

  His Dad nodded, “I see all right.”

  “So’s I can have my own pizza bar, the idea was; I worked it out; I’ve a bit put by already. Silas d’Ambrose is not that old and he’s doing very nicely thanks, can take sixty quid a night at the week-ends, easy. I’ve planned a lot better show than his …” he paused, “only it’s all over now.”

  There was a long silence.

  “So it’s over to you. Dad, if you look after Frances I’ll do the rest, eh?”

  “I ain’t said I’ll look after Frances,” Joe’s Dad observed, “since I’ve not clapped an eye on her. I might not like her, how about that, eh?”

  “You’ll like her all right, Dad.”

  Though Joe had had more than enough of this haunted, long-drawn-out day, it seemed years away from this time last night when he was squatting on the roof trying to work out things, hoping that his instinct about Sledge’s activities in the Kensington flat had been imagination.

  As he left his father’s room he heard a kind of rat-scratching on the flat door. “Christ,” Sledge gasped when Joe opened it and looked out. Joe very much did not wish to see Sledge either at this moment or ever again but he also did not wish Frances Smith, now in his mother’s bed and, he hoped, asleep, to be awakened by an argument. He stepped outside, pinning back the latch, and shut the door too, after him. The wet warm wind blew in his face.

  “I knew you’d got home, I watched you come in,” Sledge snarled. “What the hell are you doing with that bird?”

  “Get out of here,” Joe returned uncompromisingly.