Young Man, I Think You're Dying

by Joan Fleming

  Alas, alas! The gutter rats and the Sledges will always win in a contest of wits with those more simple. First he brought out a bundle of folded banknotes and, looking very straightly and honestly at Joe, he handed it to him. “What I owe you for last night …”

  “Gettaway with it!” and Joe struck the offending notes out of his hand; they fell on to the wet concrete, narrowly escaping being tossed over the wall into space.

  “What’s the good of that?” Sledge wondered, but he couldn’t resist bending down and picking them up. “Come clean, have you? Don’t want to touch the tainted money … Phew, you’re bright yaller …”

  “I never promised to help in murder!”

  Sledge clicked his tongue, shocked. “That’s a nasty word.”

  “How could you be such a bloody fool?”

  “It was the old lady was the bloody fool; she was going to shoot me.”

  “Good for her, I wish she had …”

  “She was a dangerous lunatic. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I was just trying to shut her up; she began screaming; I pressed a cushion against her mouth to stop her. How could I help it when she fell apart in my hands?” He looked at Joe, hands widely spread, like the domestic help who had accidentally broken the best teapot.

  But Joe had no intention of arguing with him on the strip of balcony outside his parents’ flat, or anywhere else. He backed to the front door, not wishing to turn his back on Sledge, for a definite reason.

  “Wait a minute.” Sledge darted round the corner, out of sight and reappeared almost immediately with a luxurious-looking zippered piece of hand baggage and a pigskin handbag. He bowed slightly: “The property of your friend Miss Smith, who was out with me yesterday afternoon.” He put a world of lasciviousness into his leer, heavy with innuendo. “Yes, we went to Maidenhead. Oh, what a loverly bird! I was pitched, reelly I was; forgot meself so far as to drive off with her possessions; been wondering how I could get them back to her and blow me! In you come with the self-same loverly piece …”

  “Shut up!” Joe hissed. He snatched up the baggage and threw it behind him, into the flat. “Now eff off,” he begged.

  But Sledge had no intention of leaving; he leaned back comfortably against the wall and said he was going to the police tomorrow to tell them the whole story.

  “It’s just a matter of who’ll get there first,” Joe returned.

  “Not at all, not at all. I’ve no record, remember; it’s my story vee yours. It’s more like you killed her and I did the driving, since it’s my car; you’re a bigger chap altogether, hefty, stronger physically.”

  “There’s nothing to pin it on me, nothink at all.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  “Of course there isn’t …”

  “Except, where’s your black wool pullover, the one you were wearing when you left work?”

  After one paralysed moment Joe attacked him, unwisely. He had often rushed at him in desperation when he goaded, over the years since they were both boys in the playground; once Sledge had lost his temper and hurt him very badly in the crutch and since that occasion Joe had been more wary. Sledge lost his temper now and a hideous situation developed when it appeared that he was trying to throw Joe over the wall to drop twenty-one stories on to the concrete forecourt below. There was an iron handrail along the top of the wall, bringing the lifting necessary to throw over anyone or any bulky thing to the awkward height of five feet; Joe clung to this rail with both hands and instinctively remembering the crutch-kick he had once received he fought back like a mad thing, his legs flailing wildly, one kick arriving on target and knocking Sledge double with groans of agony.

  Joe quickly slid inside his own front door, slammed it, and sank down, breathless, crying but turning his sobs to gasps when he realised Frances was kneeling beside him and thin cries of anxiety were coming from his father’s room.

  So finally Frances was introduced to Joe’s father in a manner very far from the way Joe would have wished and the noise of banging and kicking on the front door distracting them all three.

  “Has the chap gone mad?” Joe’s Pa wanted to know. “Sounds darn like it to me; you’d best ring up the police now, Joe lad.”

  Being an outside door fairly exposed to the elements it was stronger than it would otherwise have been; it withstood Sledge’s attack and by the time Joe had pulled himself together enough to call the police to restrain the madman, there was an ominous silence.

  “He’s thrown himself over and a damn’ good thing,” Joe’s father said out loud.

  Joe could barely stand up, his legs would not keep steady enough for him to convey himself to the telephone or even to much-needed bed. He had felt himself to be hanging in space for a few appalling seconds though he had not in fact been as near to it as that; he felt he could never again go out of his own front door without turning sick and dizzy. If he had been one who was afraid of heights he would never have been able to live contentedly in Fiery Beacon, but he suddenly became conscious of the terrifying height of their home above the ground.

  When he sat up on the roof in “his place” he enjoyed the slight perceptible swing as though the whole building were swaying, when there was a strong wind; the feeling was not so imaginary because it did sway slightly but now his semi-circular canals had been upset and were behaving as though they had been put in a centrifuge. He was, in fact, feeling the actual symptoms of sea-sickness and he remained sitting on the floor in the hall, head down between his knees, whilst Miss Frances Smith made friends with his father, giving the reasons for her presence in a series of alarming headlines.

  “… so that is how I come to be here, Mr. Bogey, and thank you very much for allowing it.”

  “That’s all right,” Joe’s father said comfortably, “what’s worrying me now is this chap Sledge. I saw him often as a boy, always coming into this flat; hasn’t been here so much recently; I never took to him but our Joe admired him, copied him and all that.”

  “The thing is,” Frances explained, “he’s got magnetism; it’s not that he’s good-looking or charming; in fact, I think he’s ugly, and his hair that ghastly colour! But he’s colourful, his clothes and all those beads; and then he’s confident and bossy; gives you the idea that he’s in with ‘everybody’ whoever that is. I quite understand how Joe felt about him, look at me! I’ve fallen into the same trap! But I can’t understand why he’s brought my baggage back, and un-touched!”

  CHAPTER VII

  MADAME JOAN, Palmist, did not exactly live for her work; she had so many troubles of her own that she could attend to those of her customers with only half her mind, some of the time. Indeed, there were times when her blonde receptionist stood in for her.

  When she had time she would grumble at the small amount she charged, only ten shillings and sixpence with an extra five shillings for telling the same things all over again in cards, “confirming her findings” was what she called this. She often boasted that she could set up in Harley Street and earn six guineas for half an hour of listening to people talking about themselves, if only someone would lend her the money to get started there. As it was, she earned quite a good living as a poor man’s psychiatrist, mostly amongst foreigners, occasionally wild characters from the North, in London for football matches, and she also had a small group of regulars who came every week or every month for guidance.

  Most of her customers took it for granted that she had supernatural powers, that she switched over to “the Fates” once the ten-and-sixpence had crossed her palm. But the interesting thing about her was that she did, in fact, have second sight, or the perfectly natural phenomenon of extrasensory perception, when she was concentrating. Though she couldn’t have cared less whether she had this or not, it was a fact that three generations of women before her, her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had been “Fortune Tellers,” and the extra-sensory perception which lies dormant in everyone (only occasionally stirring, to the disbelief of all) can react to continued stimulus. She woul
d hand out all the usual patter about tall, dark strangers and journeys abroad and then, if she were in the least interested in the person sitting before her and they happened to be listening anxiously, she might come up with something to which it was really worth listening. The strange thing was that her customers hardly ever realised this; they would, if they went to her for more than “the giggle,” remember, later on, that what was now happening to them had been foretold them by that fortune teller they went to in Soho, but as fortune-telling was the woman’s profession and as they had paid their fee it aroused no surprise or surmise.

  There was one vitiating snag in Madame Joan’s supernatural powers, she never knew whether the information she actually received referred to the past or to the future, unless, of course, it was something to do with her customer’s death.

  Only her regular customers, having nothing better to do, called in the mornings as a rule. She was therefore surprised that a young man should call shortly after her advertised time of opening. Her daughter, being a hairdresser, and not yet left for work, was in the process of taking out her mother’s rollers after drying her hair; she showed the customer into the consulting room and, returning to the bathroom, helped Madame Joan to put on the splendid black lace mantilla which she always wore with great effect, the lacy edge pulled well down over her eyes, to make them look mysterious.

  The fee paid, Madame Joan leaned across the purple silk tablecloth embroidered with gold thread and took both her customer’s hands, looking at him with as much interest as she could muster at this time of day. His hair was really a shocking colour; in a crowd he would stand out like a carrot-coloured flag; marvellous in a girl but a disadvantage in a young man, possibly.

  “Oh, dear me,” she exclaimed, bent over his palm, “oh dear oh dear oh dear!” W. Sledge stirred irritably. She was silent for so long after that first outburst that he couldn’t help snapping nervously: “Well, get on with it!”

  Her head flew up, her lips retracted. “Have patience, young man,” she reproved. She placed his hands flat on the table, palms upwards, and studied first one, then the other. She turned them over and looked at the back of his hands for so long that he broke out into a nervous sweat.

  “Well, I never!” she exclaimed.

  And then, after an unbearable length of time, she poured out the usual mechanical lingo; there was the dark girl, of course.

  “Do you see any other girl?”

  “Oh yes, my dear, I see a girl, but strangely mixed up somehow …” she tailed off vaguely. After a moment or two she went on: “I think I ought to warn you to be careful.”

  “In what way?”

  “You’re in some danger …”

  He wriggled forward excitedly in his chair. “What kind of danger?”

  “I’m not sure, another five shillings and the cards might be able to tell me something more.”

  Out came the five shillings and out came the cards; she flipped them professionally, to and fro; she handed them to him and asked him to shuffle and cut; she studied them carefully.

  “I see a beautiful, rich young lady,” she said in her old professional whine, swinging away into the usual ambiguities, and when she had finished she sat with her hands folded on the table in front of him and stared at him.

  “But remember,” she went on dreamily now, “all is not gold that glitters.”

  “How do you mean?” he snapped back.

  “You are in danger, you know; fortune and success apart, you’re in danger, so I’d take care if I were you.”

  “This young girl you mentioned, how do you know she’s rich?”

  “I can see a motor car,” she murmured huskily, “a beautiful long white motor car and this girl …”

  “You’re getting mixed up,” he chuckled, pleased, interrupting her, which was perhaps a pity, in the light of what happened later. “That’s my car you see; just bought it!”

  “Oh, is it?” She was losing interest now. “I’m afraid your time’s up now, can you find your way out?”

  “Well, ta a lot.” He stood up and walked to the door.

  She relented: “Now mind what I said, you’ve been warned … about the danger, I mean.”

  “Okay, and ta again!” he called over his shoulder. He seemed in a hurry to go now.

  As Madame Joan’s daughter finished off her mother’s hair-do her mother said: “Funny that; I would swear those hands had been or are going to strangle someone.”

  “Who? Young or old?” The girl went on with her job; talking over her cases if they had been in the least interesting was quite a normal occurrence with her mother.

  “I didn’t see who, I didn’t actually see anything except a big white car. I knew he’d tried to strangle somebody with those hands, that’s all, or will do.”

  “Well, how about ringing the police?”

  “What’s the good of that?”

  “The public are asked to help in the crime thing, heard it on the telly last night …”

  “I don’t know whether he has already strangled somebody or he’s going to strangle somebody; besides, if I did, it’s got to happen or it has happened, I can’t stop it even if I knew who he is and who he’s going to strangle; if it hasn’t happened it’s got to happen, it’s there, written in the air …”

  But the noise from the lacquer-spray being used liberally on her newly-set hair drowned her words and her daughter was no longer listening anyway.

  “My girl can’t stand the colour of my hair,” he told the barber three streets away.

  “What you bin doin’ to her?” the barber asked, fingering the stuff which was, in fact, a deeper shade than carrots.

  “That’s what she says, anyway.”

  “I could bleach it,” the barber suggested unrealistically.

  “Cor! I’d look a right Charlie …”

  “Albino’s the word,” the barber said helpfully, “I’ve a coupla those as customers; why not try a nice pale albino? makes a change; only you ain’t pink-eyed to match.”

  “You’re pulling my leg as well as my hair,” W. Sledge snapped irritably.

  “It’s only … well, you got pale skin to match your hair, like, I mean your skin kind of goes with your hair, see what I mean?”

  “Well, I’m not going to parade around as no effing albino just to please you,” W. Sledge shouted.

  “A nice rich black, then,” the barber agreed hurriedly, “but don’t blame me …”

  “Get on with it, man!” W. Sledge urged.

  And now, unconsciously, W. Sledge’s walk, though it did not actually change, took on characteristics it had not shown previously; it became more purposeful, verging on a swagger. Not that he, or anyone else he knew, walked much, but there was always the long and longer walk from where one had to park the car if he couldn’t leave it in his usual underground dive; they were careful about their parking, W. Sledge and those of his ilk; parking-fine tickets can lead to magistrates’ courts and from there if you were not careful to police courts; it was wiser, if much more difficult, to park carefully.

  It’s like this, he might well have argued; if you strangle an old, old lady … either it gets you down and you crawl to the nearest police station, flat on your face … or you don’t; if you don’t, you’ve got to rise above it. And if you do rise above it, you’re way up there, you’ve got this feeling you’re top brass, that is, you’re above others; you’re on your own and you’ve got to act like you’re somebody. Act? Well, it’s not that much acting either; you are somebody.

  That, in fairly simple language, was the way it worked with W. Sledge, anyway.

  He had not, of course, seriously meant going to the police, which he had threatened Joe Bogey with this morning; he had hoped Joe would not be at home so that he could graciously return the cases to the young lady, whom he knew to be sheltering in Joe’s flat, because he had watched from his car for Joe’s return home; giving them back to her as though he had chanced upon them and was doing her a favour. Joe’s manner inf
uriated him: perfectly ready to help in a spot of crime when there was no danger, only the pleasure of driving the car and getting well paid for it. But the minute there was a spot of bother he acted scared; much too chummy with those parents of his; they’d talk him into going to the police easy. It was a near thing; he’d been so angry he really had been going to chuck Joe over, only he was so heavy, he couldn’t get him up over the handrail, that was the trouble. Anyway, he hoped he’d scared Joe out of any informing nonsense, and thus he brooded on his way back to the car and home from the West End.

  With his now temporarily smooth, dull, lacquered black head, wearing the only suit he possessed, a tight black affair, the sleeves much too short, the suit he would have worn for the old lady’s funeral, had he attended it, he strode back to where he had carefully left at a meter his white car and drove home to Fiery Beacon, parking it in a different position from usual.

  The lifts did not start from an indoor entrance hall but from a concrete paving, sheltered from the skies but definitely out-of-doors. This had often annoyed W. Sledge and he had promised himself, one of these days, to move to a “luxury flat,” possibly one which had a jazzy carpet in the entrance hall and mirror-lined walls, where he could lounge about, admiring his reflection and smoking, whilst waiting for the lift, instead of standing in a moist draught in a puddle of water where the concrete was slightly worn.

  Arriving at the seventeenth floor, too, he would have preferred it if he had stepped out on to thick carpet, inserted his key into a lush, flush door rather than step across more concrete which often meant avoiding puddles even up there and putting his key into the lock of his front door whilst rain was blown down the back of his neck.

  However, an end to all this was in sight at last.

  It was satisfactory that Amrita should utter a high thin scream and gather her bosoms together in terror at the new look of him; it was slightly less pleasing when, having finally recognised her lord and master, she should walk round him, her face showing extreme distaste.