Young Man, I Think You're Dying

by Joan Fleming

  “And me,” Joe said.

  “You didn’t move out of the car, son,” Joe’s father put in.

  “Well, there it is …” Joe looked down at his hands, wondering what it would feel like to smother somebody.

  “Except that he’s been here just before you came home, Mum. My black pullover with the white phosphorescent initial on the back … I left it in Sledge’s car … he planted it in the garden of the flats. It’ll have been found by now.”

  They sat still, shocked into a tense silence.

  “And where does she come in?” Joe’s mother asked, looking at Frances Smith.

  “I have just left home for good,” Frances murmured quietly but she still could not resist putting it in the novelettish way she chose to think of it, “because my father was selling me to a business man, that’s all.”

  “That’s not all,” Joe put in, “by a long chalk.”

  “It didn’t take long for me to get into trouble, I must say,” Frances agreed. “You may think I was looking for trouble and determined to get it. I suppose I was over-excited, which my nurse was always complaining about; ‘she’s over-excited,’ Nanny used to say; it was supposed to explain everything. It may explain how I met your Sledge in a coffee bar and got talking, and how I let him carry my things to his car which was parked not far off, and how he took me to a kinky clothes shop and got me a job there, to start one day next week, I mean, and how I went off with him because it was a nice day and had tea at a hotel by the river in Maidenhead …”

  “And how you didn’t have a roll in the hay,” Joe put in with scarlet face. “And how you’ve no intention of taking that kinky job.”

  “And how, when we got back to Chelsea, he was annoyed, I suppose, because I didn’t want what Joe calls a roll in the hay, he pushed me out of the way, as I stood on the pavement, so that I couldn’t reach for my things, slammed the door and drove off.”

  “He can’t keep his fingers off of something for free,” Joe grumbled.

  “So I had nothing, not even my purse, and so, even though it was after closing time, all I could do was to go to the kinky clothes shop, luckily finding them still there, and ask them where he lived, and they told me here, and so I came.”

  “And all day she’s been going from flat to flat, pretending to be a person employed in doing market research … looking for him.”

  “But I slept in your bed last night, Mrs. Bogey; you see, I went up to the roof to spend the night since I couldn’t find Sledge, there wasn’t anywhere else, and Joe came up by chance and met me there …”

  “Found you, more like.”

  “Found, then.”

  “And now. Sledge looks like a madman; he’s overexcited, if you like! He’s just brought back her luggage …”

  “I can’t think why …”

  Far from being crushed by this welter of complicated information Mrs. Bogey showed signs of being herself excited. “This is quite something to come back to, eh love?” She smiled at her husband. “It needs a bit of thinking out, planning, Joe lad; we might as well try to sleep on it tonight and you …” she looked thoughtfully at Frances, “can use Joe’s bed and Joe can sleep on the sofa in the living-room and I’ll have my own bed back, thanks; not that I’ll sleep but I may as well be comfortable whilst I”m thinking things out. Now, Joe, get a move on, lad, you can’t sit mooning about things; go and get yourself a couple of blankets from the airing cupboard; and you,” again indicating Frances, “can take your things out of my room and tidy the bed …”

  Joe felt a warm comfort coming over him; he felt about eight years old and happy. His mother was behaving just as she used to, bossing, organising, coping with her unruly family; it made him happy because it was so different from her recent manner with him: looking past him, ignoring his remarks, turning her back to him and letting him hold forth, even leaving the room when he was in the middle of one of his diatribes against the older generation and their ways.

  When they were alone together she turned to her prostrate husband whose great hollow eyes were, as always, watching her. She knelt down beside the bed and put her arms round him: ‘This is reel trouble, isn’t it?”

  “He’ll have to go to the police soon,” Joe’s Dad said, “and that’s for sure; it’s the best thing, love.”

  “Not it,” Mrs. Bogey said stoutly. “You leave it to me, love, I’ll cope somehow; give me time to think, that’s all I need.”

  About eleven-thirty, when the day-shift was starting work, Frances Smith went to the pizza bar and asked for Mr. Silas d’Ambrose. The young man who was working behind the counter had fair hair like a page boy of the Middle Ages and sulky features; Frances watched him, looking sulky to match, whilst Mrs. James Trelawny, a cigarette hanging from her lower lip, genteelly ran the mop between the spindly legs of the tables. “Waiting for Mr. d’Ambrose, are you?” Frances did not even bother to answer.

  By the time Silas arrived there were half a dozen early customers enjoying their pizzas at three tables. He at once offered Frances a pizza which she accepted gratefully, but said that as she now had her handbag there was no need to treat her, she could pay for it, and did so.

  “Do you mind taking me on behind the counter instead of Joe Bogey?” she said. “That’s what I’ve come about.”

  Silas shook his head: “It’s not a suitable job for a girl.”

  “Why not?” Frances asked in astonishment.

  “Well … for one thing … it’s heavy industry, turning that dough over.”

  “Women have turned dough over, kneaded it is the word, since Eve!”

  “And then there’s lifting that metal tray into the oven; it’s heavy and it’s got to be raised to shoulder-height!”

  “Pooh! That’s nothing.”

  “And you’ve got to be very nippy, quick, that it…”

  “I can be very quick when I want to.”

  “Why should you want to?”

  “Because I can imagine things I might have to do which are much worse.”

  “Indeed?” A long pause, then: “No, I really do shun girls like you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I see them sitting about in offices in their thousands, all looking bloody marvellous but doing damn’ all; they only exist, it looks like, to take men’s minds off the day’s work. Oh no, thanks very much!”

  “Look, you great big boob! I’m going to do this job; I’ve watched Joe and I know just how to do it; there’s no … no mystique about it; even you could do it, if you weren’t so bloody lazy!”

  Silas stared at her, frowning, raising his eyebrows, and frowning again.

  “Yes, you’re appallingly lazy; if I had a pizza bar I’d do the hard work myself and save the money paid to those kid-chefs!”

  “Kid-chefs!” Silas repeated in great wonderment.

  “Furthermore, I’d swab the floor myself and not leave it to Mrs. James Trelawny! All your profits are going on wages! All you do is to sit with your feet up, reading Playboy … that’s what Joe said.”

  “That’s not all I do,” Silas scratched the back of his head wildly. “I take the cash and watch out that nobody escapes without paying.”

  She began to laugh, unaccountably; she laughed immoderately.

  He started to laugh, too, until they both became slightly hysterical and Mrs. James Trelawny looked out from behind the curtain to the domestic quarters, in great disapproval.

  “Great Scott!” Silas brought out a red spotted bandanna handkerchief, blew his nose and mopped his brow.

  “That’s a corny old one, my father uses that expression, Great Scott!”

  “My father did too,” Silas said, and they both started to laugh all over again.

  “All right, you can have a go at it and you won’t hold out more than one night, I’ll bet. You can start tonight. Has Joe Bogey hopped it?”

  She nodded. “When I got up this morning, he just wasn’t there. His parents did not seem too worried, though. Mrs. Bogey suggested I come and ask you for
his job till he turns up again.”

  Silas sobered up rapidly. “I thought that was about to happen.”

  “Explain.”

  “That Sledge friend of his; I’ve had my eye on that friend, or so-called friend, of Joe’s for quite some time. It’s only been a question of time; the Goody versus the Baddy, the Baddy always wins, doesn’t he?”

  “Why didn’t you stop it, then?” Frances asked angrily.

  “Because there wasn’t the slightest chance of Joe taking any notice; surely you know that? What young chap ever listens to advice, especially such advice as: ‘That friend of yours, Sledge, is no good to you, drop him.’ ”

  “Well, this time it’s …” she looked round and lowered her voice, “it’s real trouble. Only murder!”

  “An old woman in a Kensington flat or …?”

  “Um,” she nodded again, “how did you guess?”

  “It’s his kind of thing, robbery with violence. That was yesterday’s murder. Sledge called for Joe. I knew something was ‘on.’ Can’t say I actually guessed but it is his kind of thing.”

  “Whose kind of thing?” she asked anxiously.

  “That chap Sledge. He came the night before last to pick up Joe, just before closing-time; dressed up to kill … I mean that literally. Too confident, too, too confident. I thought it wouldn’t be long … Personally, I’d have said he was a gun man.”

  “Not guns,” she murmured sadly. “Hands, just his hands, Joe had nothing to do with it, he did not even go into the block of flats.”

  “I know, I know, he drove the Jag though. Oh, I know all about Joe’s passion for driving. I suppose all these kids have to learn to drive and get a driving licence; and then the one thing they want to do is to drive. I know how much he enjoyed driving my MG, on the few occasions I have let him. This Sledge has a Jag … irresistible!”

  “I wonder why Joe couldn’t afford to buy himself a car, he gets paid here well enough.”

  “Don’t you know? I thought you knew everything! He is saving up to buy his own business.”

  “Poor Joe,” she said, her head drooping forward.

  “Sledge has everything, things have come too, too easily to him; he is only, what, just over twenty-one? I’ve never known how old he is, probably younger; but he has a flat of his own and, believe it or not, he keeps an Indian mistress. What is there left for him? He is a young chap of unbounded energy and plenty of ideas and a perfectly appalling temper, he once had a fight in here with some chums with whom he lost his temper, laid about him like a mad thing. We had to call in the dicks to break it up. He is that type …”

  “What type?”

  “Started off being a criminal at a very early age; green lights all the way; what is there left? It’s all come too easy.”

  “Do you think he murdered the old lady purposely, then?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t think he did; in fact, he would set out with the idea of not doing anyone any harm, but when he saw he was going to get caught with the loot, if he couldn’t get out in time, say, or she caught him at it and tried to phone the police … well, he had to kill her; do you see?”

  “Not quite, but you’ve done some thinking about it, I can see that.”

  “Three years running a place like this; you can’t help but pick up lots of information about people, about the customers and what sort of guys they are; we’ve lots of regulars and some of them are the type of Sledge; we’ve often had the police along asking about someone or other they’re after.”

  “Um.”

  “Now our Joe is a different type altogether; he is fundamentally secure; he enjoyed driving that Jag more than you or I could imagine; he possibly enjoyed getting the rake-off too; he wouldn’t have liked the robbing though and he has some moral code, too.”

  “He’s thoroughly scared now, anyway. I’m staying with the Bogeys; Mrs. Bogey came home from Ireland during the night; she’s a marvellous person, and that poor husband of hers! I love them. They say I can stay in their flat. But when I got up this morning and I found Joe had hopped it—well, either he’s gone to the police to Tell All, or he’s just gone! It was his mother who suggested I come to you and ask if I can do Joe’s job ‘till he comes back,’ she said. It could be that Joe has removed himself to save his parents in some way or other.”

  “My God!” Silas exclaimed, scribbling furiously on the table-top with a toothpick; “Oh, my sainted bloody Aunt!”

  “Oh, my paws and whiskers!” Frances squeaked, “but what?”

  “Aw hell!” Silas flung round from the tiny table and stared down at his feet. “If Sledge has had a taste of killing, he may do it again; it would be typical. It’s the way a certain type of criminal behaves.”

  “You mean … he’ll be out after Joe because Joe knows the lot?”

  “Yes, I do; that would be the next move, Joe knows the lot, as you say … therefore it would be better from Sledge’s point of view that he didn’t live. I could be wrong, God help me, I hope I am.”

  Frances was appalled. “So the next thing will be Joe’s body found somewhere around, on the waste ground where they park their cars at Fiery Beacon, for instance?”

  “Oh, nothing as simple as that; it’s much more difficult to convict if there is no body at all, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know, but you’re frightening me.”

  “I’m frightening myself. How can we possibly tranquillise ourselves by saying he has disappeared ‘to save his parents’? It’s not sense!”

  “He was going to the police perhaps.”

  “That’s just it. Did he get there, is what I want to know?”

  “If he did he went at an extraordinary time, he was gone when I got up late this morning, and his Mum was bustling about, fully dressed, her face all closed up. Something happened between them, but she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me.” She looked across at Silas. “But who would blame her? I can’t even trust myself!”

  CHAPTER IX

  IT WAS, though, for S. Ledge as well as for W. Sledge, a harrowing time between the “accident” and the inquest; every time the door bell rang he had to go to the door and crouch down to peer out of the peep-hole to see who it was. He could, in his new role of killer-on-his-own, open the door to the police who came to make enquiries about his lost love but what about anyone calling on other matters, such as murder in Kensington? And one of the worrying things was the new look of the police in action.

  Gone was the bumbling bobby; these new men were stem of purpose, without humour or the slightest possible joke; they had tight frozen faces and cold eyes.

  In the absence of any suspicions (because how could they be suspicious of anyone as broken-up by the circumstances as S. Ledge?), they were scrupulously polite. Whilst they were there, civilly asking the obvious questions, S. Ledge could not take his eyes off the brown paper carrier into which he had neatly packed the gaudy finery he had so unwisely worn for his last job and carelessly not yet disposed of or even hidden. The orange polo-necked pullover was not fortunately showing over the top of the carrier at all, only the cream thick fisherman’s knit showed slightly, very slightly, and there was nothing remarkable or unusual about it. Since they were there to investigate the apparent suicide of his best-beloved why should they evince any interest at all in the contents of a brown paper carrier with the names Marks and Spencer on the side?

  Nor would they have if the times had not been out of joint.

  They had come about the Indian girl.

  The unexceptional questions went on: How long have you known her? Had she any family that you knew of? Where did you meet her? Had she ever threatened suicide? Has she been in hospital or shown any symptoms of mental illness?

  He answered them all scrupulously. He answered all the questions as a law-abiding civilian, out of work owing to unfortunate strikes in the building trade, shocked and debilitated by the tragic event. They left in apparently subdued decency.

  Though W. Sledge was as sharp as his schoolteacher
s had considered him, that word did not necessarily cover powers of observation; had it, he might have been even more jumpy than he was. Their civility as they left after the questioning lulled him into confidence, the hardness of their eyes meant nothing to him.

  They were heavily silent in the police car, driving back to headquarters; they made their report for the inquest; it was only later when they were relaxing, their faces unfrozen, that one of them very simply said: “There’s just one thing … why the dyed hair, um?”

  The others nodded.

  No one forgot.

  It was Mrs. Bogey’s ethos: “It’s the small things that count, is what I always say …”

  In ten years of occupation Fiery Beacon had harboured no more than the average amount of crime and only petty crime at that. Tower blocks were said to be cradles for criminals but Fiery Beacon had so far disproved that opinion. In the absence of garden fences over which to fraternise, lines of washing hanging out in tiny back gardens (none allowed at Fiery Beacon) and the fact that these inhabitants were Londoners and part of a terrifyingly big metropolis in which the next-door-neighbour played an almost non-existent part, Fiery Beacon did not house a community so much as a variety of workers and idlers. Upholstresses working at home, television writers, bank clerks, navvies, commercial artists, elderly retired couples, a Baptist minister, a poet who served in a grocery store, garage mechanics, salesmen, part-time hospital nurses; people whose lives and interests did not in any way impinge one upon the other.

  The shocking death by a fall from the seventeenth floor only momentarily drew together those of the inhabitants of the north side who had been at home when it happened; but they were drawn by the passing tragedy and not by any mutual interest. Thus, what Mr. S. Ledge did with his life after the event was not really of interest, even to those who had shown signs of continuing to be friends.

  No one either knew or cared whether or not he had acquired a new car, replacing the Jaguar. Here and there would be old ladies, peering out from behind their net curtains, but this activity is singularly uninteresting in a tower block, partly because amongst several hundred inhabitants one might never see the same person twice, or remember them if one did, and another reason was that above the first two or three floors it was only possible to see the ground immediately below by leaning out of the window, and then you saw only the top of people’s heads as they went in and out. Even the make of car they possessed was unrecognisable from far above.