Sky High

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘Not all. But increasingly more.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought that it was easy to break open a safe single-handed,’ said Liz.

  ‘That’s because you’re not an expert,’ said Cleeve with a grin. ‘Well, no. Perhaps safe-breaking isn’t a good example. Safe breakers usually work in threes. But take your country house burglar. There’s your crown prince of criminals.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Bob,’ said the General, ‘Is that you’re really half in sympathy with all these blackguards.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Cleeve seriously. ‘Most of them are sad nuisances. But just an occasional genius. Do you remember Feder? Or Barry, as he called himself. Outwardly a respectable average adjuster in the city. And no nonsense. It was a real business. If you had an average to adjust, he’d adjust it for you. Only it didn’t quite support his flat in Albany and his house near Leatherhead and his three cars and his strings of racehorses and girlfriends. Those had to be paid for out of his homework.’

  ‘Homework?’

  ‘Not very often – so far as one can judge, not more than two or three times in a year – at about eleven o’clock at night he’d leave his country house. No guests that weekend. A conveniently deaf butler and a cook who slept in the far wing. He’d roll his car quietly out of the garage and drive off fast into the night. He’d be back before morning. Old man Reynard, lolloping home to his earth, with a big grin on his face and a tuft of feathers in the corner of his mouth. And sure enough, you’d read in your paper that the country house gang – when in doubt the papers always call it a gang – had broken into the Earl of Mudshire’s residence near Sunningdale and had removed the gold plate from the dining-room, the intaglios from the Long Gallery and the Countess’ own hundred diamond matching necklace (which was of the highest sentimental value to her Ladyship) and the insurers had been informed. Only it wasn’t a gang. It was clever Mr. Feder, who was known to the county as Barry. Who had taken the trouble to teach himself – at an age when most young men are training to cut out an appendix or draw up a will – to pick a lock, dislocate a burglar alarm, silence a dog, and cut a precious stone or a throat in a neat, quiet, gentlemanly way. All his jobs were surgical operations. Long, slow, careful planning, followed by quick, ruthless execution.’

  ‘I should have thought,’ said Liz, ‘that when he got back to his roost with the loot his troubles were only just starting. How on earth did he turn it into cash?’

  ‘Well, that’s always a snag. He overcame it by patience. He concentrated on jewellery and precious metals. As I said, he could cut a diamond as well as most experts. And he made his own settings. Lovely work, some of them. But the real thing was that he was able to wait. Years, if necessary. And, of course, when he did come to dispose of anything, his position in life was a help. He wasn’t a hole-and-corner sort of person. He lived a straightforward ordinary life and had lots of rich friends. If he offered a well-known jeweller a pair of pendeloque-cut diamond earrings set in platinum filigree, the jeweller was hardly likely to approach the transaction in a suspicious frame of mind. But suppose, as a matter of precaution, he checked through his latest numbers of “Hue & Cry” and the “Pawnbrokers List.” He wasn’t going to find anything. The diamonds were probably a pair of reshaped marquise-cut stones which had been stolen three years before. And anyway, why should he be suspicious? He knew Mr. Barry well. A very nice gentleman indeed, who had bought a gold cigarette case from him only a month before.’

  ‘Clever that,’ said the General. ‘I suppose you’d say that his greatest risk was being seen actually on the job.’

  ‘A risk for him,’ said Cleeve soberly. ‘But, by the Lord, a very much greater risk for the person who happened to see him.’

  ‘A killer?’ A look of interest flickered into the General’s frosty eye. Killers, he understood. He had encountered a lot of them in his time, two-legged and four-legged.

  ‘Not by nature, perhaps,’ said Cleeve. ‘But a man like that would kill to preserve his identity. There aren’t many of them about at one time, and the police have got a short list of suspects. I don’t know just how the list is compiled, but you can take it it’s there.’

  ‘And you mean,’ said Liz, ‘that if some absolutely independent witness – a servant or a guest or the householder himself – happened to meet your man actually on the job, then he’d have to be killed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cleeve. ‘Otherwise the police would be round next day to show him a bunch of photographs and – respectable Mr. Barry, businessman and churchwarden, would be marched off to the clink, and no one more surprised than the Vicar.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t tell you how Feder was caught. It was just before the war. He had broken into a house at Great Missenden – after diamonds, as usual. Only this time, for various reasons he went in whilst the family was at dinner. What he didn’t know was that the son and heir, a bright young chap aged eleven, was hiding in a cupboard in his mother’s bedroom. Why he should have been doing that, I don’t know. There’s no accounting for children. He watched Feder walk in, break open the dressing table, force the wall-safe, remove the jewel cases, and so on. Took him about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Was he wearing a mask?’

  ‘Not on your life. He wore gloves, but never any form of disguise. Reckoned it was safer that way. If he was seen at a distance he calculated on being mistaken for a guest or servant. It would have spoilt the effect if he’d been wearing a hood or a false beard. When Feder had finished, the boy thought he would jump out and say Boo! – just to see what happened.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ said Liz, whose throat was unaccountably dry.

  ‘By the grace of God, no. At the last moment discretion got the better of valour. Of course, that’s why the boy’s alive today.’

  ‘And he identified Feder—Barry?’

  ‘Without hesitation. Made a splendid witness, too, I believe. Completely unshakeable.’

  ‘Bob, you’re making my flesh creep,’ said Liz.

  ‘Sorry. Unforgiveable. And I’m doing more than that, I’m keeping you out of bed.’

  ‘I must be getting along too,’ said the General, regretfully.

  ‘Give you a lift?’

  ‘That’s very good of you. Don’t know why Liz puts up with us. Come along here, drink her coffee, talk our heads off. Bore her stiff.’

  ‘It’s her own fault,’ said Cleeve. ‘She listens too well.’

  ‘I can assure you, poppets,’ said Liz, ‘that whatever else you do, you don’t bore me.’

  She was getting past the age when she cared for a lot of sleep. When her guests had gone she took out the coffee cups, and washed and dried and stacked them. Then she threw a handful of fir cones on the economical early-autumn fire, and settled down to read.

  Eleven o’clock had struck faintly from the church tower up the road when she heard the sound that half her mind had been waiting for; the click of a key in the lock.

  Footsteps, which paused in the hall. Sometimes Tim went straight up to bed. Sometimes he didn’t. Tonight after a moment of hesitation, the footsteps came on.

  ‘There you are,’ said Liz. ‘I’d been wondering what had become of you.’

  ‘There I am,’ agreed Tim.

  ‘You’ve missed Bob and the General.’

  ‘Had they got anything interesting to say?’

  ‘I always think Bob’s interesting. He was talking about how Chief Constables get appointed – and about country house burglars.’

  ‘Sounds fascinating,’ said Tim.

  He threw himself back into an armchair, which twanged softly. He was not tall, but thick and solid. ‘What had Bob got to say about country house burglars?’

  ‘He was telling us about one who used to operate before the war. His name was Feder, but he called himself Barry.’

  ‘Oh. Before the war.’ Tim seemed to lose interest. He lay slouched in the chair, his shoulders hunched, his arms hanging down so that the knuckles brushed the carpet.

&nbs
p; ‘You look as if you’d got the grumps,’ said Liz.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve got the grumps. And don’t tell me that all I need is a dose of salts. It goes deeper than salts.’

  Mrs. Artside was not sure if her son wanted to talk or not. If he did, she was very willing to listen. If she said the wrong word he would dry up and go to bed.

  ‘Who have you been terrorising this evening?’ she asked.

  ‘First, it was the Vicar.’

  ‘Not worth powder and shot.’

  ‘He’s a silly little man,’ agreed Tim. ‘Really, a silly little man I happened to meet him on my way down to choir practice. We started talking about politics.’

  ‘Oh, dear. And him a timid, pale-pink radical.’

  ‘Not about his politics. About politics in general. I said, what a pity it was we hadn’t got a system of free election in the church. Then parishioners would have a say in electing their own vicar. He said, terribly solemnly, “You ignore the spiritual values, Artside.” I’m sorry to say I laughed.’

  ‘That wasn’t terribly tactful.’

  ‘Spiritual values my foot. A four-figure living and only two hundred parishioners to look after. He’s on to a soft job here, and he knows it.’

  ‘It’s certainly well-paid, as livings go,’ said Mrs. Artside. There isn’t much connection between work and stipend in the church nowadays. Probably never has been. Still, you mustn’t go around quarrelling with the Vicar.’

  She did not say this with any conviction. She was not greatly attached to the Reverend Hallibone. ‘Who did you fight with next?’

  ‘After choir practice,’ said Tim sombrely, ‘I had words with our phoney Major.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘He’s such a little snurge.’

  ‘Even if he is a snurge,’ said Liz, ‘and it’s not a term I’m familiar with, that’s surely no reason for quarrelling with him.’

  ‘But he’s so bogus.’

  ‘He’s the best tenor in Brimberley, Bramshott or Alderham.’

  ‘You and your choir. Do you know, I don’t believe he ever was in the Army at all.’

  ‘He must have been, or he couldn’t be called Major. Unless he was in the Salvation Army.’

  ‘If you ask me, he’s made the whole thing up. Do you know, I saw him once, at a tennis party, saluting one of the lady guests – wearing flannel trousers and a blazer, and he gave a natty little salute, and I thought, I bet he’s seen some chap do that on the stage and thought how good it looked, and he’d try it out some time.’

  ‘It still doesn’t prove he wasn’t in the Army.’

  ‘I don’t believe that anyone who had ever been in the Army would salute anyone else whilst he was wearing white flannel trousers and a blazer. Besides, he talks about the K.R.R.C. when he means the 60th – and the Provost Corps – and the Royal Field Artillery.’

  ‘Perhaps he was in the last war.’

  ‘Not old enough.’

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ said Liz. ‘Suppose you’re right. Lots of people call themselves things. I knew a man who called himself Commander and wore a yachting cap, and he’d never been further from the coast than the end of Blackpool Pier.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind him calling himself a Field Marshal, if he’d keep his hands off Sue.’

  ‘If he’d do what?

  Tim realised that he had told his mother a good deal more than he meant to.

  ‘He offered to walk home with her.’

  ‘He lives in the same road.’

  ‘He’s a nasty little man,’ said Tim. ‘I can tell by the way he looks at her.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to go by?’

  ‘It’s enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Liz. She spoke with surprising firmness. ‘You can’t go round accusing people of that sort of thing without evidence. It’s just not done.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tim, ‘that makes two of you.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Sue said much the same sort of thing, only rather more pointedly. I had a stand-up fight with her, too.’

  ‘Lord love us,’ said his mother mildly, ‘Is there anyone you haven’t been scrapping with tonight?’

  Tim ignored this. His heavy body was relaxed in the chair, but his curious green-brown eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over Sue,’ he said at last. ‘I used to think she was rather keen on me. I don’t mean anything serious. After all, she’s only seventeen. Hardly out of school, really. Do you remember the first time she came round to tea here, when I’d just got back from Palestine. She must have been twelve or thirteen – all legs and tennis rackets. And that’s the way she stayed in my mind ever since – until last month – at the staff college dance. I saw her dancing with some old buffer and thought – she looks rather good.’

  Mrs. Artside, who was suffering from a series of complicated emotions, decided that it was safer to say nothing at all. Chiefly, she was filled with amazement that any man of over thirty could know so little about women. Good heavens, she thought, he’s talking about this thing as though it had never happened before in the history of the world; as though, every day, some gangling schoolgirl with all her defences down didn’t turn into a stickly, prickly bundle of complicated young womanhood.

  ‘Then this evening,’ Tim spoke in such a tone of pained forgiveness that his mother was hard put to it not to laugh, ‘just because I put that snurge in his place, what must she do but fly off the handle, although I don’t believe,’ he added magnanimously, ‘that she can have meant half the things she said—’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘—and she’ll probably be sorry about them later, but the fact that she could say them at all was a shock. She actually implied that I went round stabbing people in the back—’

  ‘Lots of people I should like to do that to,’ said Liz. ‘Look here, I’m not worried about you and Sue – I mean,’ she added hastily, ‘it’s very upsetting but, as you say, it’ll probably be all right in the morning – but I don’t like the idea of your being rude to MacMorris.’

  ‘Oh?’ With an obvious effort Tim removed his mind from the puzzling problem of sex.

  ‘I don’t expect anyone overheard you, and MacMorris is sensible enough to keep quiet about it, but we’re living in a village, and I’ve lived in villages long enough to know that everything you do leads to something else – usually something you didn’t expect – and ends in feuds, and people who live next to each other not talking to each other, and that sort of silliness.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘You think I ought to apologise to him?’

  ‘It wouldn’t do any harm.’

  ‘But he’s such a—oh, all right. If you think so. I shan’t have time until tomorrow evening. Busy day tomorrow.’

  ‘I should think that would do very nicely. You’ll both have cooled off by then. And as for Sue – you say she was really annoyed?’

  ‘She didn’t pull her punches.’

  ‘You can take that as a good sign. When a girl’s really finished with a man she laughs at him.’

  ‘She certainly didn’t laugh.’

  ‘I’m going to bed. You won’t forget to—’

  ‘Stoke the boiler, put the dogs out, bolt the front door and turn out all the lights.’

  ‘So long as you do it,’ said Liz.

  When she had gone, Tim lay for a long time, quite relaxed now. He had a gift for keeping still which a professional burglar might have envied. Only his eyes moved with his thoughts.

  The telephone bell brought him to his feet.

  ‘Hullo – yes? Oh. Well, I think she’s in her bath. Can I take a message?’

  The telephone said something querulous.

  ‘I didn’t quite get that.’

  ‘Who is it?’ said Liz from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, here is Mother. Hold on a second.’ He p
ut his hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘It’s the Vicar. He’s upset about something and it’s making him squeak. I can’t understand it all. Something about a key.’

  ‘I’ll deal with him.’

  Liz sailed down the stairs, majestic in a flame-coloured dressing-gown.

  Her arrival seemed to have a soothing effect on the Vicar, whose voice came down two semitones at once. Liz listened carefully and without interruption.

  ‘I’ll find out what Tim did with the key,’ she said at last. ‘We can’t do much tonight. I’ll ring you again in the morning. No, no. Of course not. Quite right to telephone me at once—’

  She rang off, and said to Tim, ‘Have you still got the church key?’

  ‘Oh, Lord. Yes. I believe I have. I dropped it into my mackintosh pocket. I meant to give it back, but that business with Sue—’

  ‘Are you sure you shut the church door?’

  ‘Yes, certain.’

  ‘And locked it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure I locked it. What’s it all about?’

  ‘The offertory box has been broken open. Hallibone found out when he went up to the church about an hour ago. He’s got his own key, of course. The one you’ve got’s the only other one.’

  ‘I see,’ said Tim rather blankly. ‘How much does he reckon he’s lost?’

  ‘The box hadn’t been cleared for a week. It might have been as much as two pounds.’

  ‘Crime,’ said Tim, ‘comes to Brimberley.’

  Chapter Three

  ACCELERANDO E FORTISSIMO

  Princess: ‘Fair payment for foul words is more than due.’

  Liz always knew, at the moment she woke in the morning, whether anything unpleasant stood unresolved from the night before. She had no need to think about it consciously.

  This faculty dated from the bad time, now more than thirty years past, when Bill had gone, and the world had been shaken and her life turned upside down.

  Apart from it she was not, at this stage in her life, a particularly sensitive or apprehensive person. By the time she had got up and got dressed and started helping Anna with the breakfast her intellect would be back in command. Nevertheless, although it could be banished, the weakness was there; something in her make-up, which she would take along with her until she lost all sense and feeling; like a patch left by a clumsy surgical operation.