The Crack In the Teacup

by Michael Gilbert

  “Nor I am,” said Terry. “I came up here with a message from mum. She said, don’t be late tonight, because her mother’s coming over.”

  “You can tell her from me that if she thinks I’m going to go without my wallop just to listen to my mother-in-law nattering, she can think again.”

  “Do you really want me to tell her that, dad?”

  “No.”

  “Tea,” said Anthony. “A hundred-and-ninety-four for six. Good enough. If Seaford can get half that in the time that’s left, they’ll be surprising themselves.”

  As they got up, Chris said, “That little matter I was talking about. If I came to see you, officially – would you be interested? I could manage eleven o’clock on Monday, if that suited you.”

  Anthony paused, with one foot on the pavilion step. Behind them, the players, umpires and supporters were drifting across the green field towards the tea tent. It was always interesting, he thought, when an acquaintance turned into a client.

  “Why, yes,” he said. “As far as I know I’m free at eleven. Come along and we’ll talk about it.”

  The last Seaford wicket fell soon after six with the score a hundred-and-eleven. By half-past eight Anthony was sitting on a bench in one of the shelters on the sea-front wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his evening.

  At that hour the Marine Parade was full of strolling couples and family groups. Mostly they were the sort of people James Sudderby would have approved of. Solid folk, with money to spend, and no idea of kicking up a shindy.

  And surely – yes – there were the Burgesses. They were going into the Pleasuredrome, Barhaven’s newest attraction, which offered a heated swimming-pool and ten-pin bowling, with Bingo and dancing in the evening.

  Behind the Burgesses, two girls were loitering, arm in arm. Both wore their light hair dressed in a way which suggested an unconvincing sort of wig. One was wearing what looked like a sack, belted at the waist. The other wore very narrow, light blue jeans and a short black leather jacket.

  They were clearly waiting for someone to take them into the Pleasuredrome.

  Well, why not? Not both of them, of course. One of them. For preference the one in the leather jacket. But suppose you couldn’t separate them? And how would you start? “Would you care to accompany me into the Pleasuredrome?” He knew exactly what would happen. A haughty stare. “As a matter of fact, we’re waiting for a friend.” And, as he moved off, they would giggle. How they would giggle. The whole thing was fantasy, anyway. Could he, a professional man, a partner in the old-established firm of Brydon & Pincott, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, start picking up girls on the front? Well, could he? That was a question which had puzzled and worried him before, and which now presented itself afresh. How did you start? What was the opening move which culminated in those desirable joys, those scufflings in the secluded corners of the Odeon, those intimacies in the back seats of parked cars, those rollings in the short grass behind the ninth hole on the Municipal Golf Course? Other people did it. Look at Chris Sellinge. When he cut away early from the pub everyone had known where he was going. It was an open secret that he was running a girl from the Sea-Side Stagers who were in the middle of their Mammoth Summer Season at the East Pier Pavilion. Chris was older than he was; and – let’s face it – not terribly attractive. How had he started? How did anyone start? Was there some trick, some knack, or gimmick, something unaccountably left out of the syllabus for the Law Finals; some key which, once grasped, unlocked this final door? His theoretical knowledge of sexual practices was detailed and comprehensive. He had built it up from jokes heard at school (jokes at which he laughed conscientiously, afterwards analysing them to extract the hard grains of fact round which their fancies were built); from graffiti on lavatory walls; and from those useful paper-backed American novels which could be bought on railway station bookstalls and thrown away at the end of the journey. Straightforward love-making; love-making not so straightforward; perversion; masocho-sadism, transvestism, narcissism, fetishism; he knew it all.

  He had never kissed a girl in his life.

  He decided to go to the cinema.

  When he came out, the sky was bright with stars. The Marine Parade was emptier. There were couples in most of the shelters along the front; two or three couples in some, intent on their own business, unmindful of each other.

  The Pleasuredrome was still open, and busy. The foyer was a blaze of lights and he could hear the band playing. A babble of voices. Louder voices. Screams of laughter. Screams.

  Anthony quickened his pace.

  As he was passing it, a door at the side of the building opened with a crash, throwing a fan of light across the pavement. A man backed out, dragging someone. It was a body, which the man held under the arms. He straightened his back, heaved, and the body skidded across the pavement and ended up in the gutter.

  Anthony took half a pace forward, then stopped. A drunk was being thrown out. It was none of his business.

  Now the man had gone inside again, but the door was still open. There was a clatter of footsteps, a stamping, an exchange of obscenities, and the man reappeared. This time there were three people involved.

  One man was holding a struggling boy. He held him easily. His right hand had twisted the boy’s right arm behind his back, locking it in an upward position, his left hand was holding the collar of the boy’s jacket. With his knee, he was frog-marching him forward in a series of spine-shattering jerks. The victim’s free left arm whirled in a circle, but failed to connect.

  The second man stepped close to the boy, and put a finger under his chin, tilting it back. “He’s young to be out without his mum, isn’t he? What’ll we do with him? Cool him off in the sea?”

  Using the only weapon available to him, the boy jerked his head forward. His forehead hit the second man on the bridge of the nose. The man rocked back on to his heels, came forward again, and hit the boy full in the face with clenched fist. Then, swinging his arm well back, he hit him again. At the second blow, the boy screamed.

  “St—st—stop it,” said Anthony. The stammer which afflicted him in moments of crisis rendering him almost speechless. “S—stop it at once.”

  Both men looked up.

  “I should — off, if I was you,” said the man who was holding the boy.

  Anthony was shaking with rage.

  “If you hit that boy again,” he said, “I’ll g—get the police.”

  “No bother,” said the second man. “There’s one right behind you.”

  Anthony swung round. A constable was standing in the mouth of the alleyway. With him was a stout man in a dinner-jacket.

  “These the boys, Mr. Marsh?” said the constable.

  The man in the dinner-jacket came forward and peered down at the first boy, who was climbing slowly out of the gutter and back on to his feet. Then he looked at the second one.

  “That’s them,” he said. “Rotten little bastards.”

  “You’re sure of it?”

  “Dead sure. I noticed ’em when they came in. I didn’t like their looks. I ought to have turned ’em out.”

  “I take it you’ll be preferring a charge.”

  “You’re damn right I’ll be preferring a charge. If they’ve damaged the machinery it might cost a couple of hundred pounds to put it right. I’ll say I’m charging ’em.”

  “You’d better ring for a car. Barhaven 2121. Ask for the duty officer.”

  “Right,” said Mr. Marsh.

  “Are you going to charge these men, too?” said Anthony. He had got back control of his voice.

  The policeman looked surprised.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” he said.

  “I wanted to know if you were going to charge these men.”

  “Charge them?”

  “With assault.”

  “Assault on who, sir?”

  “On these boys. I know this one, by the way. His name’s Terry Roper. One of these men held him, and the other hit him, t
wice.”

  “It’s a lie,” said the second man. “We were having a fight. He hit me, and I hit him.”

  “If he cuts up rough, we’ve got to get a bit rough too,” said the first man.

  The constable said to Anthony, “I don’t see how you come into this at all.”

  “I saw it happening. I saw this man hit the boy in the face, while the other one held him.”

  “If that’s right, how did he hit me?” said the second man, and pointed to his own face, where a bruise was already developing on the cheekbone.

  “He butted you with his head.”

  “It sounds like a real mix-up,” said the policeman. “You can tell us all about it in court, on Monday.”

  “I shall certainly be in court,” said Anthony.

  “Here’s the car,” said the policeman. “Put the boys in the back.” And to Anthony, “Personally, if I were you, I should go home and go to bed, and have a nice sleep.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Burgess undressed methodically. Just because he was on holiday, Mr. Burgess did not believe in being sloppy. He emptied everything out of the pockets of his blue blazer, and placed it on a hanger. Trees went into his brown and white shoes.

  Mrs. Burgess said, not for the first time, “I shan’t go back to that place again.”

  “Rowdyism,” said Mr. Burgess, removing his top-set and placing it carefully in a glass of disinfectant. “It’s something I can’t tolerate.”

  “It’s the last thing I should have expected in Barhaven,” said Mrs. Burgess.

  “I’ll have a word with James Sudderby tomorrow. I’m told there’s a sports club out at Splash Point. You need a bit of pull to get into it. But he’ll be able to fix it for us.”

  “No reading in bed tonight,” said Mrs. Burgess. “I’m tired.”

  Mr. Burgess climbed in beside her, and turned out the light. “What did happen?” he said. “I saw a lot of people fall down.”

  “Someone moved the floor. A girl fell through into the swimming-pool.”

  “Not what you expect in Barhaven,” agreed Mr. Burgess.

  Anthony’s home was in one of the new building estates on the fringe of the town, and it took him ten minutes’ fast walking to get there. There was a light in the downstairs room which had been turned into a bedroom for his father, to save him climbing the stairs. As he unlocked the garage doors, his father called out.

  “It’s all right,” said Anthony. “A bit of trouble in the town. One of my clients.”

  “Are you going to see him now?”

  “I’ll have to, yes.”

  “A fine time to see a client,” said his father.

  Anthony backed the car out. He knew where Charlie Roper lived, having given him lifts home from cricket. It was in the area behind the station, an uninspiring egg-box of matching streets and mass-produced houses. As Anthony stopped his car outside the house he saw the curtain in the front room move, and Charlie had the front door open by the time he reached it. He put a finger to his lips.

  “Wife’s asleep,” he said. “Evening, Mr. Brydon. Thought I recognised your car. Something up with Terry, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Anthony. “We can talk in the car, as we go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the police station.”

  “Silly young sod,” said Charlie. “What’s he done?”

  “It’s not only what he’s done,” said Anthony. “It’s what’s been done to him.”

  He told him, and Charlie listened in silence. At the end he said, “The other boy’ll be Sam Mason. Sam and Terry’s always around together. They sort of egg each other on. If they’ve run into real trouble this time it may bring ’em to their senses.”

  Anthony stopped the car.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “If they’d just been fooling about and been run in, I wouldn’t have bothered. A night in a cell and a good fright is probably what they were asking for. But this wasn’t anything like that. One of those men held Terry, and the other hit him, hard, in the face, twice. He’s probably broken his nose. I don’t know what they did to the other boy. As he was in the gutter being sick, they’d probably kicked him in the stomach. It was none of it necessary.”

  Charlie Roper looked at Anthony curiously. He had never seen him in that mood before.

  He said, “They’re a rough crowd at the Pleasuredrome. I heard they got two or three men down from London – professional chuckers-out. They were frightened of Mod an’ Rocker trouble and didn’t want to take chances. I expect that’s it.”

  Anthony engaged gear and drove on. It had occurred to him that it was always stupid for a solicitor to get more worked up over a client’s troubles than the client was himself.

  The boys were sitting on a bench in the charge room. When Terry opened the remains of his mouth in a sickly smile, it was clear that one tooth, at least, was gone, and there was a long purple bruise across his face from left eye to right cheek. Sam Mason was chalk-white but otherwise seemed unharmed.

  Anthony said to the desk sergeant, who was making entries in a ledger, “This is Mr. Roper. He’s the father of that boy there. I’m their solicitor. If you’ve finished booking them, is there any reason they shouldn’t be taken home?”

  The desk sergeant finished what he was writing, blotted it deliberately, and said, “Can you identify yourselves?”

  Anthony looked at Charlie Roper, who looked blankly back at him.

  He said, “You could ring up my father. That is if you really think I’m an impostor. He’s pretty well known in the town.”

  “I’ll have to ask the Inspector.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’ll be here in a moment—I think this is him now.”

  The newcomer, Anthony was glad to see, was Inspector Ashford, the head of Barhaven’s small C.I.D. force. Anthony had met him, and, illogically, had liked him because he had played rugby football for Blackheath and Kent and had had a trial for England.

  The Inspector acknowledged Anthony’s existence with a tight smile, and said to Charlie Roper, “You ought to keep your son at home in the evenings, Mr. Roper.”

  “What’s he been up to?”

  “They seem to have caused a bit of trouble at the Pleasuredrome. They had the bright idea of pulling the lever that controls the dance floor over the swimming-bath. It’s a sliding arrangement. When the bath’s in use, they roll it back.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “A girl fell through into the pool. And two or three more got hurt in the stampede. And there’s a question of damage to the machinery. When they tried to stop it, they put it into reverse and stripped a lot of cogs.”

  Anthony said, “First things first. This boy ought to be seen by a doctor. And they’d be better at home than here. Mr. Roper can stand surety for his son. I’ll undertake to produce the other one.”

  “Hasn’t he got a father?”

  “He lives with his mother,” said Anthony. “If you try to bring her out here at this time of night she’d have a fit.”

  Inspector Ashford considered the matter. The unshaded overhead light shining down on his head showed up a deep scar, which ran from his left temple to a point behind his left ear. It was more a fold than a scar.

  Anthony remembered how Inspector Ashford had got this. It had been during the final England trial at Coventry. He had been kicked on the head, and had been unconscious for forty-eight hours. It had cost him his England cap, too.

  “We shall want them in court on Monday, ten o’clock sharp,” the Inspector said. “You can take them away.”

  Chapter Three

  Anthony Appears in Court

  Miss Barnes, the Chairman of the Barhaven Magistrates and Councillor for the East Marine Ward, was a dark, squat, taciturn woman with a large mole on one cheek. She had qualified, but never practised, as a barrister and ran a prosperous nursery garden specialising in miniature pot plants.

  “Anything else you want to tell us, Mr. Marsh?” she
said.

  Mr. Marsh said that the damage to the machinery was not, fortunately, as serious as had at first been supposed, but, on the other hand, the damage to the good name and reputation of the Pleasuredrome was deplorable. “Once decent people get the idea it’s a rowdy place,” he said, “they won’t come near it. I’ve heard from a lot of our patrons already. They’re absolutely disgusted. One of them said to me, only this morning, ‘We’ve been coming to the Pleasuredrome regularly since it opened, three years ago. We’ve never had any trouble there before, and now—’”.

  “We’ve got the point,” said Miss Barnes. “Anything you want to ask him, Mr. Brydon?”

  “Yes,” Anthony said. “If you haven’t had any trouble in the three years since you opened, Mr. Marsh, why do you need two chuckersout?”

  “I have two attendants. They’re not employed as chuckers-out.”

  “What do they do? Hand round lemonade?”

  “No.”

  “Look after hats and coats? Clean the brass? Compare the dances?”

  “What I said. They’re just attendants.”

  “All right,” said Anthony. “Let’s look at it this way. They’re your employees. You must give them some instructions about what their duties are. What do you tell them to do?”

  “I tell them to look after things—generally. See that the dancers behave themselves.”

  “And if they don’t behave themselves?”

  “They ask them to leave.”

  “Ask, or order?”

  “Well—order, if you like.”

  “And if they won’t leave?”

  Mr. Marsh looked uncomfortable, and shot an appealing look at the bench.

  “Then they can – in fact – use a degree of force – a reasonable degree – to evict them.”

  “And a reasonable degree of force includes punching boys in the face and kicking them in the stomach?”

  “I don’t quite see where this is leading us,” said Mr. Lincoln-Bright, from his seat on the left of Miss Barnes. “It’s the boys who’ve been charged, surely, not Mr. Marsh.”

  “It comes in this way,” said Anthony. “That I hope to be able to show you that however reprehensible this prank by Roper and Mason was, the treatment which they received was out of all proportion to the offence.”