Die-Cast (A Peter Marklin Mystery)

by Neville Steed

  ‘No, it’s not goddamned all right.’ I heard Maxwell’s Texan drawl. ‘Get out of here, Longhurst. You’re high as a kite. Go back to your cowsheds and sleep it off.’

  By now Lana-Lee was by the intruder’s side. I made to move forward, but Arabella held me back.

  ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not our business.’

  ‘Ben, keep out of this.’ Lana-Lee took the big man’s arm. ‘Adam, go home. Please go home. For Christ’s sake, don’t do anything we’ll all regret.’

  He jerked his arm free, and began moving unsteadily towards Maxwell, who was standing his ground.

  ‘Why the hell do you put up with him, Lana?’ the big man countered, with sadness rather than anger in his voice. ‘He’s a bum. He’s always been a bum. A two-timing, three-timing, four-timing bum.’

  Jean-Paul and Saunders moved quickly between Maxwell and the man, who I now know was called Adam Longhurst.

  ‘Get out of here now, Longhurst, or I’ll call the police,’ Maxwell shouted back.

  ‘Not before I’ve finished with you, you won’t,’ Longhurst bellowed, and tried to bulldoze his way between the Frenchman and Saunders.

  ‘Who was that bloody woman you had in your car, when I saw you lunchtime, Maxwell?’ he continued shouting, as he struggled so violently with the two men that Saunders was knocked sideways into an antique table, which shed its canapés and champagne glasses to disintegrate on the floor.

  It was at that point that I ignored Arabella’s advice and moved forward into the fray. For by now, Longhurst had managed to grab Maxwell by the neck, and the one thing I do dislike at parties is murder.

  As I arrived, Jean-Paul jumped on to Longhurst’s back, and clung like an ape to its mother. I pulled Saunders up from the broken glass that was like gravel under my feet, and indicated to him to go round Maxwell’s side, to the right, whilst I went to the left. Meanwhile, Longhurst, amongst burps, was still bellowing.

  ‘You take your lousy prick back to America, Maxwell, or I’ll end up breaking every bone in your body. You’re ruining everybody’s life while you’re here.’

  Gurgles were all his throttling hands were allowing by way of his adversary’s reply. I tried prizing his left hand from around Maxwell’s neck, whilst Saunders worked on the right side. Suddenly, Longhurst relaxed his grip my side, and I was just about to congratulate myself, when something at least as rock solid as a sledge-hammer struck me in the face and I went reeling backwards into somebody’s arms, my vision, for a few seconds, approximating a fairly exciting evening at a planetarium. By the time I had pulled what was left of me together, I found that I was lying on top of something soft, distinctly tremulous and silky. It was Lavinia. I mumbled something or other, and we helped each other to our feet. By the time I looked back at Longhurst, the crisis had mercifully passed its peak, as he was now pinioned from behind by Saunders and Jean-Paul, after Maxwell (as I was told later) had managed to knee him in the groin, whilst Longhurst was recovering from sledge-hammering me. Conquered physically, he may now have been, but his threats boomed on. Suffice it to say, all of them centred around Maxwell’s parentage and the different kinds of gruesome ends he would come to if he did not get out of England and leave Lana-Lee alone.

  Suddenly, Arabella came up to me leading Lana-Lee by the hand. I could see that out of my now only one good eye.

  ‘My God, you need a raw steak,’ Arabella whispered, and inspected my rapidly closing left eye. I grinned weakly.

  ‘No, I don’t feel like eating right now thanks.’

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ Arabella responded kindly. ‘Can you see well enough to drive? I’ll see to your eye when you come back. Promise.’

  I could just spot Lana-Lee shaking her head and pulling at Arabella’s hand. I squinted. It hurt.

  ‘More or less. As long as it’s not a rally, I guess. Why?’

  I looked across at Longhurst, because suddenly the room seemed cathedral quiet as his bellowing died away. I wondered if Maxwell had bopped him one, but apparently, it proved to be just the drink winning its own fight.

  ‘To save the whole world knowing what has happened here tonight, could you drive him quietly home?’

  ‘Him?’ I pointed, slightly incredulous.

  ‘Him.’ Arabella whispered, ‘Lana-Lee was going to get a taxi, as she doesn’t want to bother the boys from Reinhardt with a personal affair like this. And I’m afraid I offered your services just in case he started up all over again in front of the cab-driver.’

  I gazed at Longhurst who had been propped up in an arm-chair. He now looked more like an overgrown baby than a bull. But, notwithstanding, he would still tip the wicker basket at close on fifteen stone, and reach at least six feet two inches against the nursery door. And who knew when he’d pummel his little fists again?

  ‘Supposing he starts up once more with me?’ I asked, wincing from the pain in my steakless eye.

  Lana-Lee came close. ‘He won’t. I know him,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s like a lamb, normally. I don’t know what got into him tonight. But please, let me ring for a cab and...’

  Arabella gave me one of her looks.

  ‘No, no. I won’t hear of it. If you say he’s normally like a lamb...’

  ‘You’ll take him back to his farm,’ Arabella smiled, and gripped my arm gratefully. ‘Like me to come with you?’

  ‘Did Longhurst come in a car?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll see.’ Lana-Lee went to the windows and drew back the curtains.

  ‘His Range Rover is outside.’

  ‘Then if you tell me where he lives, I’ll drive him home in that. And Arabella can follow behind in my Beetle.’

  ‘I’ll be eternally grateful to you, Peter,’ Lana-Lee’s voice was starting to break and I could see moisture welling in her eyes.

  ‘His farm’s not far. About two miles back towards Weymouth. Over on the right-hand side. There are two big white five-bar gates, and a sign “Maranello Farm”. His housekeeper, Maud Evans, should be there.’

  The penny suddenly dropped. ‘Strewth, he’s not the Longhurst, is he? The famous flying farmer, the Ferrari enthusiast with the thousand acres?’

  Lana-Lee nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. Does it make a difference?’

  ‘No, no.’ I lied, ‘not a bit.’ I looked at Arabella. ‘We’d better be going.’

  We moved over to the now gently swaying figure of Longhurst. Through the moist and blurred vision of my bad eye, the white of Lana-Lee’s dress seemed to flare and then fade. Instantly, my mind, yet again, went back to that rain-swept road and the apparition that had disturbed my return from the Minic lady’s house.

  3

  It wasn’t until the next morning that the reality of the events of the night before came through to me. At the time, they seemed somehow dreamlike, or scenes from some film or other, especially the eerie flash of white I had spotted on the rainy road, which Arabella explained away as probably a sheet of old newspaper blowing about in the wind. Later, maybe it was the champagne or the magnificent setting of the Manor, or just being in the presence of a famous movie star, who knows? Even the drive up to Longhurst’s laughingly-called farm seemed to add to the sense of fantasy, the headlights of the special six-wheeled Wood and Picket Range Rover picking out the statuary (I counted five Greek-style naked figures. Arabella counted six.) in the manicured grounds immediately surrounding a huge cream thirties-style house, that rambled in sweeping curves and Crittal windows from one wing to another. The whole juxtaposition of styles unnerved me, and I was glad to see a shaft of light emanating from an open front door, as I swung to a halt. The housekeeper had obviously heard the cornflake crunch of my tyres on the raked gravel of the drive. Before I could open the walnut-silled door to help Longhurst out of the back, she had done it for me.

  ‘Thank God he’s back. He worries me to death when he goes out again in that state. Shouldn’t drive, he shouldn’t, like that...’

  By this time, Arabella had joined us, and we thre
e manoeuvred Longhurst out of the exotic Range Rover, and supported him into his even more exotic Art Deco palace, that looked as if it had escaped from Bournemouth. Certainly the frail figure of the housekeeper could never have managed on her own.

  We offered to help him up to his bedroom, but both he and his housekeeper, Mrs Evans, maintained Arabella and I had done more than enough already. So we helped him into a drawing-room that really blew my and Arabella’s minds. It was huge and pure Hollywood, circa 1936. You expected Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to waft in from the French windows at any second. Practically everything in the room was cream, when it wasn’t heavily figured walnut, and even the latter was often inlaid with horizontal bands of creamish wood, like sycamore. Arabella, with her Beatrice Lillie short hair and black dinner jacket, seemed splendidly in period.

  As we made to leave this unlikely farmer, he beckoned us back to his chair and said very quietly, now without trace of a slur, ‘Can’t thank you now. Not properly. Bit under the weather, you understand. Do apologise.’

  I waved my hand in a ‘think nothing of it’ way.

  He held his own up. ‘No. Will thank you and your super lady one day. Sure Lana-Lee will too. You’ll see.’

  As he mentioned her name, his face tightened, and I thought for a second, the lamb might be metamorphosising once more. But no. I think he’d had enough for one night.

  ‘Sorry. Just that bum Maxwell, you see. Lana-Lee and I were going to’ — his voice trailed away — ‘before he came back. Can’t understand it. Ruined everything.’ He looked up and gave a weak smile. There was a tear in his eye. ‘Anyway, thanks again for helping an idiot like me.’

  I shook his proffered hand, and winced slightly. Drink had certainly not weakened his shake. He looked up at Arabella. She leaned over automatically, and kissed his cheek. A stranger he might be, but he was that kind of man.

  *

  Business, as usual, was slack so I sat back in my chair, and, whilst waiting for a customer or two, read, as well as one can with a severely swollen eye, the previous day’s local paper that I had not managed to get around to before. I soon regretted it; the local news seemed to be amazingly down-beat. The worst horror was that yet another child had been abducted and molested; she’d been found wandering on Chesil Beach. This totted up to three such appalling cases in the last four months. The police admitted that they were, as yet, without any significant clues as to the maniac who, in Inspector Digby Whetstone’s less than tactful words, was ‘not only terrorising our children, but prejudicing the Dorset tourist trade into the bargain.’

  The lesser items of news were hardly of help. There were strong rumours of an escalation in the rates, fears that a proposed oil drilling exercise might destroy thousands of acres of nature reserve, and, even coming down to the itty-bitty of our own modest village of Studland, I read that the mother of one of the guys who sells tickets for the Sandbanks Ferry had been killed by a poisonous spider, which had been hiding in the loo of a house in Sydney, Australia, whither she had gone to visit her daughter.

  However, I suppose the local news did help put the events of the previous evening into clearer perspective, for it made the trials, tribulations and jealousies of the ultra rich brigade seem definitely shallow and unimportant, like spoiled kids fighting over a toy, or nursing a grudge about something simply to add a little spice and pace to their indolent days. I decided, in the end, it was all too Scott Fitzgerald for me to worry over, although I was still peeved about my black and swollen eye. So I turned my attention to laboriously addressing eighty-seven envelopes for the photostatted information that Arabella will insist on calling my monthlies, which I send out each month to known collectors and previous customers, updating them on my current stock of vintage toys. I do quite a bit of business through mail order, as do, unfortunately, a lot of my competitors.

  Then, as there was still neither hide nor hair of a customer, I sat back and brewed on my Flamingo project. Within minutes, I realised brewing was no substitute for action, so I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages until I came to a listing of local packaging firms. I started phoning, outlining my project but not revealing the actual aircraft I was to make. Two phone calls elicited two separate polite refusals on the grounds that my order for boxes would be too small and irregular for them to consider, but the third call seemed quite promising, as the managing director was ex-RAF, and constructed and flew petrol-driven model aircraft as a hobby. I made an appointment to see him on the following Monday. Just as I was congratulating myself on having found a likely source for my packaging, the doorbell dinged. Bing woke up. I looked towards the door, expecting (as was my wont) to see a customer who would buy everything in my shop, thus breaking my rather pathetic trading pattern of late. But no, it was not to be. I looked into the big eyes in the big head of that big man again — Adam Longhurst.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind. I rang Lana-Lee. Got your address.’ He gave a self-conscious smile, and stayed by the door, as if I were somebody of whom to be afraid.

  ‘No, I don’t mind, Mr Longhurst. Come on in and shut the door.’

  He did just that. I came out from behind the counter. In a curious way he seemed different from the night before. And I don’t just mean because he was no longer drunk or that it was day rather than night. I don’t know what it was quite. He sort of seemed like his own twin brother. I guess it had something to do with a certain schoolboy (public type) charm, that his bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour of the night before had totally obscured.

  ‘I say, you’ve got an awful lot of stuff, haven’t you?’ He looked around the place. ‘Suppose it’s no good having a shop, if you haven’t.’ He grinned, and went over to a glass cabinet that housed some of the more precious of the old Dinky toys I had for sale, minimum price twenty-five pounds for something like an Austin Atlantic, mint and boxed, up to two hundred and more pounds for rare vans, both pre-and post-war, with near mint paintwork and transfers. He pointed at a Jaguar XK 120 coupé. ‘I had one of those when I was a kid.’

  ‘A toy or a real one?’ I joked.

  ‘Well, I’ve had both, actually. Toy when a kid, car when a teenager.’ (Teach me to joke with a stranger.) He turned back to me and cleared his throat.

  ‘Didn’t really come here to look at your wonderful shop, though. Came to thank you. You and your lovely friend, that is.’ He blushed. I could see it clearly, even though his face was a little florid.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘It didn’t take a minute. Wasn’t really out of our way.’

  ‘No, I’m very grateful.’ He indicated my puffy eye. ‘And I’m very sorry. I gather I lashed out at you. Unforgivable. Been carousing in a pub and drunk far too much, far too quickly. Got to thinking. Next thing I knew I was at the Manor, and — well, you know the rest. I really am sorry. I’m truly ashamed of myself.’

  ‘Happens to all of us,’ I exaggerated.

  ‘Nice of you to take it so well. Millions wouldn’t have.’

  ‘Don’t know them. Are they nice people?’ I quipped to change the subject.

  ‘Love Mrs Million, hate him,’ he smiled. And I could see what Lana-Lee must have seen in him — before Maxwell’s return, that is. He was a little boy in a big man’s suit. And a rich little boy to boot. I knew enough about him by reputation. I guess most people in Dorset did. He had inherited the thousand-acre farm from his father, who had been a breeder of the most pukkah Friesians (I think that was the breed) in the whole world. At the time, Adam, I believe, had still been in the army. On his father’s death, he left military service, and took over the running of the farm. Well, I use that verb ‘running’ a little loosely, as local gossip maintained Longhurst contributed little himself, leaving all farm affairs to his manager. He apparently preferred racing around the countryside in one or other of his collection of fancy cars — Maseratis and Lambos, that kind of self-effacing machinery. That’s why he had renamed the farm Maranello — the home base of Ferrari. (The six-wheeled Range Rover, even with a
ll the trimmings, was a bit of a disappointment to me that night for, once I had realised who Longhurst was, I expected to be driving him home in at least an Espada or, given four doors, the Italian Quattroporte variety. Hey-ho.) He had also lashed out on flying lessons, and had bought himself the very latest in light aircraft — the revolutionary American Rutan, one of the very few in this country, with its distinctive shape, sort of tail first and looks back to front. It was when he bought that, I first read about him in the Western Gazette. Locally, Longhurst was, as the media would have it, rather ‘high profile’.

  ‘Like a coffee?’ I offered, as Bing stretched himself on a Chrysler box and immediately fell off both box and counter in a teeth-tingling cacophony of vainly clinging claws. The counter was covered in such scratch marks. Bing is no easy learner.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Longhurst smiled. ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Then I’ll push back all the crowding customers and shut up shop for a while,’ I grinned back, and, after locking the shop door, led him into my back sitting-room. And so began a relationship with a man I was to come to know so desperately well over the next few weeks.

  *

  To cut a long story short, coffee soon led to the hair of the dog, I’m afraid. Not a whole coat, but quite a few hairs — enough for Longhurst to reveal quite a bit of his soul, or, certainly, that part that now belonged to the gorgeous Lana-Lee. After a while, all I needed to do was listen, and pull the odd tab on a Heineken. His story proved to be very much what you’d imagine from his conduct of the previous night. He claimed that soon after Lana-Lee had come over to England and bought the Manor, he had been introduced to her by a mutual friend. They had got on like a house on fire, and had eventually, I gathered, become intimate friends and then lovers. They had got to the point of discussing marriage, when Maxwell suddenly reappeared out of the blue.

  Longhurst had assumed she would send him packing instantly, but instead, Lana-Lee had allowed Maxwell to move in with her, an action that Longhurst not only found totally unacceptable but wholly inexplicable, for he was certain that she still hated her ex-husband, and had no wish at all to have him around, let alone living in the same house. He had tackled her constantly about her behaviour, and could get very little sense out of her. When he heard that Maxwell had begun fooling round with other women, he informed Lana-Lee, but she had shrugged it off as something Maxwell had indulged in for nearly the whole period of their marriage. So you can imagine, as the weeks dragged on, Longhurst had become more and more incensed about the whole rotten scene, until, triggered by seeing some unidentified woman in Maxwell’s Cadillac at lunchtime that day, he had drunk himself into a raging bull in a pub near Wool, and...the rest you know.