Mr Campion's Fault

by Mike Ripley

  There was a pin-drop silence and then the room exploded into laughter.

  ‘Good one, lass,’ said Exley, moving to stand behind the blushing Neil and gently patting him on the top of his head. ‘In Yorkshire we always ask why are cornets smaller than trumpets?’

  Perdita knew a vaudeville cue when one was being offered. ‘I don’t know,’ she mugged. ‘Why are cornets smaller than trumpets?’

  ‘They’re not,’ said the bandmaster, deadpan. ‘It’s just that cornet players have bigger heads. Now I know some of you lads are on earlies tomorrow, so let’s get packed away and leave it tidy so Old Twiggy has no cause to bash my lugholes or put the rent up.’

  There was a ripple of good-natured grumbling from the bandsmen as they got their feet, packed away their instruments and folded and stacked their chairs.

  ‘Be thee up at t’club later on, Arthur?’ asked one of the horn players.

  ‘Not me, Jim. I’ve shown me face in there already,’ said Exley, ‘and though I’d take a lemonade shandy off you any day if you’re offering, I’ll be looking after our visitors from …’ Exley paused and nodded towards the Campions, ‘… down south.’

  ‘So you’ll be going somewhere posh then?’ asked the second, or possibly third cornetist.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘The Green Dragon, mebbe?’

  Exley, still with a granite face, shook his head. ‘Better than that. Willy Elliff’s.’

  ‘Fish and chips! How perfectly splendid!’ Rupert gushed with boyish excitement. ‘That smell has been driving my stomach crazy. Come on, darling, I’m starving!’

  Rupert looped an arm around his wife’s waist and propelled her at speed towards the door. As he did so, he pulled Perdita close so that he could whisper in her ear. ‘Where did you learn about brass bands and triple-tonguing, whatever that is?’

  ‘I asked Stuart Cawthorne, the music master, for some tips,’ hissed Perdita, ‘so we might blend in a bit more with the locals.’

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘Well, it can’t do any harm, and it’s better than your Bertie Wooster enthusiasm for the quaint local cuisine.’

  ‘They’re never going to let us forget we’re from the south, you know,’ said Rupert, opening the parish room door and easing his wife outside.

  Perdita looked out at the wet darkness and pulled on her plastic rain hood. As she tied it under her chin, she whispered, ‘You’re right, but if we act nicely they might forget to remind us.’

  ‘Hurry up and get in t’queue before this lot get a fancy for six penneth o’chips,’ said Exley from behind them.

  The Campions, arm in arm and heads down, splashed across the road with Exley at their side but were only halfway across when a caped figure on a bicycle appeared out of the rain right in front of them, so close that Rupert felt the end of the handlebars raked across his stomach. Automatically he tugged Perdita back a step but by then the cyclist was beyond them and tackling, with a concerted effort, the slope of Oaker Hill; a hunched, demonic figure clearly visible under the street lights. Even though the rider had passed within inches of his nose, Rupert had no idea of its sex, age or identity, only the very strong memory of the smell of fried food mixed with tobacco.

  Arthur Exley, however, had no such doubts when it came to identification. ‘Adrian Elliff! You clumsy bugger!’ he yelled after the retreating bicycle. ‘Are ye blind as well as daft? You coulda killed somebody!’

  ‘One of your bandmen?’ Rupert asked as they resumed their progress.

  ‘Not flamin’ likely,’ said Exley. ‘He’s a bit slow is young Adrian.’

  ‘Not on a bike he’s not.’

  ‘Aye, well, ’e’s late for work – again, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll be even later if he has an accident,’ Rupert observed rather primly.

  ‘I think he already has,’ said Perdita suddenly. ‘Look over there. Somebody’s lying in the road.’

  Rupert shook his head to clear raindrops from his eyes and followed his wife’s stare to the dark curve of road beyond the chip shop. There was indeed a supine figure lying half on the pavement, half in the road. No, there were two prostrate bodies and two upright ones clearly intent on doing them harm.

  ‘That’s not a road accident,’ said Rupert, ‘that’s a fight!’

  ‘And that’s Ada’s boy, Roderick,’ said Exley as all three broke into a run.

  They were level with the fish-and-chip shop when the door opened, releasing a fug of steam carrying the scent of warm malt vinegar and a beam of white light which illuminated the shadowy figures struggling in the rain.

  It was Perdita who gave the rescuers their battle cry: ‘Oi! Leave my Faustus alone!’

  ELEVEN

  Platelayers’ Interlude (Off-Duty)

  ‘Well, Charlie, do I congratulates yer or do I salutes yer? I fort commanders came with boats or perhaps submarines. Did you tie yours up to Tower Bridge now they’ve closed the docks?’

  ‘Promotion comes with many a stress and strain, you old codger, but they don’t give you a boat unless you’re River Police. It’s frowned upon if you splash muddy Thames water over the smart new uniform.’

  The recently anointed Commander Charles Luke of the Metropolitan Police shrugged his oak-beam shoulders inside the folds of a damp raincoat and squeezed his bulk fluidly around the sharp corner of a table. He settled into a bench seat and accepted the pint glass of beer being slid carefully towards him by a pink hand which could have been mistaken for a pound of unwrapped sausages.

  The Platelayers’ Arms, as it seemed with all of London’s pubs, was undergoing a facelift; or as Luke thought of it, suffering improvements. Previously small, dark but snug and intensely private areas had been collapsed into one large, open plan and brightly lit area and on the single extended bar the brass and wood beer pumps which had once stood proudly to attention had been displaced by an implacable army of garishly-coloured ‘dispense points’. Everything seemed to be painted red. In a shadowy corner to the right of the bar which had once housed a battered upright piano, a shiny chrome jukebox as big as a Sherman tank sat glowering at customers but remained blissfully silent.

  Luke’s off-duty drinking companion, however, had resisted both facelifts and improvements quite majestically.

  ‘Have to say you’re looking well on it. This commander-ing seems to agree with you. Must be the sea air.’ Magersfontein Lugg raised his own glass towards thick, expectant lips. ‘Down the ’atch then, as you nautical types say.’

  Charles Luke sighed in resignation, drank, replaced his glass on the table and sighed again.

  ‘I might have known I’d get your end-of-the-pier act,’ he said without malice, ‘and I’m just glad I’m off-duty and didn’t come in my uniform or you’d have piped me aboard as I came through the door.’

  ‘They really ’ave put you back in uniform, ’ave they?’ Lugg applied his glass to his face again, his eyes twinkling over the rim.

  ‘The perils of promotion: you get a smart new uniform and a desk big enough to take a double mattress. Trouble is it doesn’t come with a mattress, just enough paperwork to stuff one, if you like a firm kip, that is.’

  Lugg lowered his glass and raised his eyebrows, doing neither with conviction. ‘Charlie Luke stuck behind a desk all day instead of running down footpads and hooligans? Perish the thort! You’ll be puttin’ on weight, my lad.’

  By no means a small man, Luke cast a jaundiced eye over the spherical proportions of his companion which strained the buttons of hunting green wool waistcoat to popping point.

  ‘And you, me old china, have absolutely no room to talk,’ said the policeman, doing a fair impersonation of a reproving judge.

  His fellow imbiber recoiled as if electrified, though by a very mild voltage. ‘I’ll have you know I’m a shadder – a perfect shadder – of me former self. I believe in keeping meself nimble, I do. Before the war my reg’lar fighting weight was eighteen-and-a-half stone.’

  ‘Which particula
r war are we talking about?’ Luke asked gently.

  ‘What cheek!’ blustered Lugg. ‘Still, it’s true that time flies when you can only remember you once ’ad fun. But I like to keeps nimble, that’s my secret. How old’s that girl of yours now? I bet she’s at the ’andful stage.’

  Luke’s face softened – a sight never enjoyed by unrepentant members of the criminal class – as into his memory floated a picture of his daughter and, inevitably, the face of Prunella, far too briefly his wife, who had died giving birth to her.

  ‘Hattie?’ he said with genuine warmth. ‘She’s a seven-year-old bundle of tricks and no mistake. Don’t know where she gets the energy. She’s like a wind-up toy that doesn’t need winding. Same principle as a self-winding watch, I suppose: the more she moves the longer she keeps going. Runs my poor old mum ragged. Even infants’ school doesn’t seem to tire her out. My mum says she’s going to get her a treadmill for Christmas, or maybe a giant hamster wheel.’

  ‘We’re none of us getting any younger,’ Lugg observed rather primly.

  Before he could stop it, Luke’s left hand twitched towards his head where his black curls, although flecked with grey, were still thick. The waywardly vain hand came under control and was returned to the table to nurse his glass.

  ‘But some of us still have to patronize a barber now and then,’ the policeman growled, casting a disparaging eye over his companion’s shining expanse of bald pate which glowed like a full moon under the pub’s neon lighting.

  ‘No need to get personal,’ said Lugg, gathering his mental skirts about him. ‘I was finking of yer muvver.’

  Commander Luke conceded the point with a brief nod. ‘I know what you’re getting at and you’re right. Mrs Luke should be putting her feet up at her age, not running round after a seven-year-old, and seven isn’t that far off teenage these days. Don’t think it’s not a worry, though she won’t have it, of course. “She’s no trouble,” she insists and says “Kids will be kids” even when a bit of her prize china goes for a Burton.’

  ‘What you need,’ said Lugg imperiously, ‘is another Mrs Luke – the wife kind, not another mother.’

  When his suggestion provoked only a drooping of the eyelids rather than a clenching of fists, Lugg pressed his luck. ‘Do I take it that as you ’aven’t told me to mind my own flippin’ business or planted a bunch of fives on me, that you have somebody in your sights?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Luke sternly, ‘that it’s none of your business, but as it happens there is someone I might have my eye on – a young detective inspector, if you must know.’

  ‘A lady policeman?’

  ‘We do have ’em, you old dinosaur. We’ve had them in the Flying Squad for ten years and this summer we had our first woman to make Commander – made it before I did.’

  Lugg’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Is that entirely kosher – wiv the hierarchy. I mean? You know, fraternization among the troops, bit dodgy for morale, that sort of thing …’

  Charlie Luke conceded the point with a seismic shrug of his shoulders. ‘It’s early days and we’re taking it quietly, but if we think there’s a future for us then Kathleen will resign from the Force and go back to her first career.’

  ‘You mean that to play lovebirds she’d ’ave to get an honest job of work?’ Lugg’s eyes widened now, the malicious imp replaced by the astonished innocent child.

  ‘You probably wouldn’t call it that, but Kathleen always fancied training as a barrister,’ said Luke, allowing himself a brief smile.

  ‘Blimey!’ snorted Lugg. ‘That’s frying pans and fires any way you cut it. Still, you’re over twenty-one and of sound mind, I reckon. Would you ’appen to ’ave told Mr C. about this paramour of yours?’

  Luke sipped beer before answering. ‘Campion? No, I haven’t mentioned anything about Kathleen to Albert,’ he said soberly. ‘Nothing’s certain yet and, in any case, Albert’s never thought much of my choice of women.’ He held up a hand to stifle Lugg’s protest. ‘Oh, I know he didn’t approve of Prunella and I but he was too nice to say anything. That’s his trouble – he’s always been far too nice for his own good.’

  ‘Don’t, for Gawd’s sake, let ’im hear you say that. Make ’im really swell-headed, that would. Positively unbearable in my ’umble h’opinion.’

  ‘To be honest,’ said Luke with pleasure, ‘I’ve never found your opinions humble, though they’re often amusing, and since you brought up the subject of Mr Campion, would you have an opinion on what he’s up to at the moment?’

  ‘Just as I suspected,’ said Lugg, pushing an empty glass across the table, ‘there’s a h’ulterior motive to you inviting me here above and beyond the sheer pleasure of my company.’

  ‘I’m not asking for State Secrets,’ said Luke, easing himself out of his seat and scooping up the pair of glasses. ‘Same again?’

  ‘If they’ve nothing better,’ breathed Lugg.

  When Luke returned with refilled glasses, Lugg sat up straight, covered his heart with his right hand and placed the palm of his left over his beer. ‘I promise to tell the truth, the ’hole truth and very little but the truth, so ’elp me Gawd.’

  ‘You can knock that off right now,’ said Luke. ‘I was just curious as to why Campion was up in Yorkshire. It’s not his usual hunting ground.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s gone a-hunting for anything. He’s retired from all that malarkey. He’s doin’ no more than presenting prizes at a school Speech Day. In fact, he’s probably not even doin’ that, just holding Lady A’s coat whilst she does the ’onours. Where could be the ’arm in that?’

  ‘Campion could find some if anyone could.’

  ‘Now then, Charlie, draw it mild. I’m telling you straight – he’s retired. He’s too old for private narking, which in most people’s opinion is rather low anyway. I told him so thirty years ago and I think it’s finally sunk in. There’s to be no more adventuring for his nibs – he’s been clear on that. “No more hopping about pulling guns and shooting lines,” he said and I heard that with my very own ears. Of course, Lady Amanda was standing over him with a metaphysical rolling pin while he said it, but there were witnesses, not just me.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Reliable witnesses.’

  ‘Is it his health?’ Luke asked with concern.

  ‘Nah,’ said the fat man, ‘he’s fit as a fiddle for ’is age. Always believed in keeping hisself nimble, just like what I do.’

  Luke bit his lower lip to suffocate a laugh. That Lugg clearly did not know the meaning of ‘metaphysical’ was one thing, but any comparisons between his planetary girth and Albert Campion’s slim silhouette of a figure raised the possibility that he had not fully grasped the concept of the word ‘nimble’.

  ‘So what’s he doing in the frozen north?’

  ‘I’ve told you, he’s at a school – a proper school, for young gentlemen – not like the Reform Schools you and me attended,’ said Lugg, his eyes twinkling.

  ‘You speak for yourself,’ bridled Luke. ‘This school, it wouldn’t be in a place called Denby Ash, would it?’

  ‘Might be,’ said Lugg suspiciously. ‘What’s your interest? Is this a professional sniffing around or just social nosiness?’

  ‘You know me, Maggers, never nosey just for the sake of it.’ Luke spoke in a voice not even Lugg would take issue with. ‘Not like some. Call it professional curiosity. Does the name Malcolm Maud mean anything to you?’

  ‘Now we gets to our muttons.’ Lugg grinned. ‘I knew you didn’t invite me ’ere just for the pleasure of me company and my insights into the social calendar of Campions large and small.’ Lugg saw a flicker of surprise in Luke’s expression.

  ‘Oh, yes, the junior branch of the family’s up in Yorkshire as well – the lad Rupert and his missus, the lovely Perdita. Staying with Perdita’s godfather, as I understand it.’

  ‘That should mean Campion will be behaving himself.’

  ‘You know his nibs better than that, but what’s any of it g
ot to do with Malkey Maud?’

  ‘So the name does ring a bell, eh?’

  ‘I’ll say. He’s from my old stompin’ ground – Canning Town. Different generation, o’course, and I can’t say we was ever bosom buddies, but I knew ’im when he was starting to move up in the world, just after the war. Went from burglary and petty thieving to the finer points of safe-breaking; became quite a cracksman, Malkey did. Got himself the nickname “Banger” because he always liked to blow the bloody doors off, as they say these days.’

  ‘That’s the feller: Malkey Banger Maud. Not one you’d give a character reference for, then?’

  Lugg crumpled his face into a scowl. ‘Wouldn’t even make me Christmas card list,’ he growled. ‘Far too cack-handed for my liking; no finesse. You’ve got to ’ave finesse when you’re dealing with explosives. I’ve known cracksmen – “Petermen” we used to call them – who could blow a safe without disturbing a spider in its web in the skirting board. Then there’s them like Malkey Maud, who used enough Composition C to blow up that bridge over the River Kwai. Not exactly subtle was Banger Maud, an’ I suppose that’s how your lot nabbed him. Not before time in my not-so-humble. There were some London streets where he did more damage than the Luftwaffe. Was he one of your collars?’

  Luke nodded modestly in professional agreement. ‘Yes, Banger Maud did leave quite a trail of destruction behind him and his hauls were never much to write home about. The judge gave him ten years not so much for his thieving as for his “reckless and dangerous disregard for public safety and private property”.’

  ‘Well, I never thought I’d live long enough to find myself agreeing with a judge,’ said Lugg ruefully, ‘but I reckon His Honour called it just about right for once. I don’t think nobody was upset to see Malkey go down, not even his dear old mum, God rest her soul. At least she got a few years of peace with him out the way. Is he still doin’ his bird?’

  Luke dug a packet of Gold Bond cigarettes and a Cricket disposable lighter out of a deep raincoat pocket and Lugg nudged a triangular red plastic ashtray across the table towards him with a faintly disguised look of disdain.