No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  Kenworthy approached unnoticed. He kicked an old brake-rod noisily along the oily concrete floor. A man came out of a lavatory, huge, barrel-chested, thick tangled hair and eyebrows that knitted down over the bridge of his nose in a permanent expression of menace, doubt and unintelligent apprehension. When Kenworthy had seen Darkie Pascoe, the features had not provided much of a model for comparison; but there was no doubting that this was Darkie’s brother. Tommy was Darkie without the dead snarl, the bared teeth or the glazed eyes.

  ‘Any hope of three gallons of four star?’

  Tommy did not speak, but went straight to Kenworthy’s filler-cap, inserted the nozzle and stood back, his eyes fixed firmly on the meter, as if expecting himself to be accused of giving short measure.

  ‘That’ll be two pounds twenty-five.’

  ‘Have a look at my oil while you’re about it.’

  He did not need any; Tommy also unscrewed one of the battery plugs, stooped down for the bottle of distilled water.

  ‘I’ll bet that came straight from the mains,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘We have our own deionizer.’ Sulky; this man did not talk; he issued challenges from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Know who I am, do you?’

  Tommy dropped the bonnet with a clatter that sounded symbolic. He straightened himself and looked Kenworthy in the eye. Kenworthy saw that his hands and fore-arms were trembling. Perhaps he was just one of those woolly-doll giants, an old English sheep-dog, a big, sprawling softie, like a Great Dane.

  ‘Did you see much of Darkie in this last week or two?’

  ‘None of us ever did see much of Darkie, did we?’

  ‘Ever visit him when he was inside?’

  ‘What, me?’

  ‘I wasn’t asking that row of bloody trees.’

  Tommy sniffed, and scratched his chin with the back of his hand. ‘What would I want to go visiting him for?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. He’s your brother, isn’t he? Was, I mean.’

  ‘Brother!’ Tommy Pascoe said.

  ‘Know where I can find Sammy, do you?’

  ‘He lives in Thurrock, doesn’t he?’

  ‘All over Thurrock?’ Trite, wasted on Tommy. ‘I mean, can you give me his address?’

  ‘Got it somewhere. At home.’ Tommy thought it out. ‘What do you want with Sammy? Sammy hasn’t …’

  ‘Yes? What hasn’t Sammy done?’

  ‘Sammy’s had nothing to do with us for years.’

  ‘Must be a man of some taste, then. I notice you’re not advertising yourself as a Vehicle Testing Station any more.’ There was no blue sign with white triangles.

  ‘That hasn’t anything to do with me.’

  ‘No? Had-it anything to do with what happened to Brian Hammond’s car?’

  ‘Dunno what you mean.’

  ‘No? Never heard of the case, haven’t you? Don’t know about a loose pin in the steering-train? Didn’t see the wreckage, I suppose? Don’t remember the to-do there was about it? They didn’t come and ask you any questions?’

  ‘I don’t have anything to do with the MoT,’ Tommy said. ‘They don’t let me.’

  ‘There’s still some hope for the poor bloody motorist, then.’

  ‘Look, mister, I got work to do.’

  ‘So have I. I’m in the middle of a patch of it this minute.’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about it, officer.’ A new voice; a short, underfed and worried little man who had come out of some office-cubicle; a threadbare blue chalk-line suit with a woollen cardigan.

  ‘Perhaps you can help me, then.’

  ‘Name’s Hedges. This is my place. Get back to the Austin Cambridge, Tommy.’

  Kenworthy watched Pascoe shamble away.

  ‘Want to come inside? It’s a bit parky out here.’

  So they went into a dark office, dominated by naked women calendars, box-files of work-dockets and invoices.

  ‘I’ve had about as much as my belly can stand of that business.’

  ‘You’d better buy yourself some bismuth tablets. You’re going to hear some more.’

  ‘How long ago was it now?’

  ‘Still within the Statute of Limitations,’ Kenworthy said. ‘I notice you’re not on the testing market any more.’

  ‘And it wasn’t for that that they took it off me. Something quite unconnected. And unfair. That’s the way they do things in this bloody country. Would you like me to tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  Hedges was the sort, Kenworthy thought, who would cultivate an aura of seediness and near-poverty, an endless complaint against the’ economics of supply and taxation, as a camouflage for his steady balance-sheet.

  ‘But you can tell me about Brian Hammond.’

  Hedges lit a cigarette, did not offer Kenworthy one. ‘Brian Hammond came in here storming with a notice of refusal that he’d had from Downtown. Excessive play in the steering-box. He didn’t believe it, and to tell you the truth, I had an open mind. Not that I went the whole hog with Hammond. He was convinced that they were all out to rook him, finding fault to keep their quota up and so that they could present him with a swingeing bill for putting things to rights. So would I have a go at it for him?

  ‘There was no question, Mr Kenworthy, no suggestion whatsoever that he wanted a certificate round the back door. He knew me better than to suggest it. If the steering was dicey, then it had to be put right. So we gave it the works. Young Sid had a look, I had a look, Tommy had a look. Tommy!’ Hedges opened the door and called across the work-shop.

  ‘I thought Tommy was not an authorised tester?’

  ‘That’s not to stop us asking his opinion. Tommy, tell this gentleman about Brian Hammond’s steering.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with it,’ Tommy said. He was standing in the doorway, oil-grimed hands dangling in front of him. ‘There was no free play at all.’

  ‘Listen, Mr Kenworthy. Tommy has the strength of a sodding gorilla. The way he shook those steering-rod ends, I thought he was going to dismount the whole bloody box. If there’d been a sheered-off nut in there, the whole bloody lot would have come away in his hand. I mean to say, look at his hand.’

  Tommy looked down at it, too, as if he were surprised that it should be worthy of comment.

  ‘All right, Tommy, back to work. Mr Kenworthy, if I could teach that bugger the difference between a decimal and a full stop, I could take on enough work to open a new wing.’

  ‘Did you take the steering right down?’

  ‘No need to. The Regulations state …’

  ‘Spare me.’ Hedges wasn’t the man to give away time and labour beyond the book.

  ‘You don’t think I wasn’t upset by what happened, bloody upset. I was not working for strangers, you know.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Those two used to park their bikes here when they were kids. I knew Sally’s mother in the years when it wasn’t coming all that easy. Her husband, you know, you could call him independent, but he wasn’t bringing in much more than a labourer’s wage. He had a rood or two more than most of his neighbours, but what did that mean, only more work? Two goats, milk to fatten his pigs. Have you ever been a slave to livestock, Mr Kenworthy? They’re a bloody sight more demanding than petrol engines. And do you know how much of that work falls on the woman’s plate?

  ‘But she didn’t relax her standards, didn’t Emily Carver. She had a light in her eyes. She knew where she was never going to go herself, and that’s what she had lined up for Sally. And who knows where Sally would have gone, if that young Prudhoe had kept his weapon to himself? Prudhoes! Don’t give me Prudhoes! If that old bastard had negotiated a lease, instead of selling out in 1941 …’

  ‘What about the Pascoes, then? It seems to me you’ve been more than half the salvation of one of them.’

  ‘Tommy? Tommy’s all right. I mean, I wouldn’t want to upset him. He might do all his thinking afterwards, if he bothered to do any at all. But we’ve managed to keep
him happy many a year now.’

  ‘And Sammy? Nobody seems to know a lot about Sammy.’

  ‘Sammy opted out after one spell in jug. Sammy’s got a woman behind him. Nasty, shrill little bitch. But that’s what Sammy needed, just what he needed. And it wasn’t exactly unfamiliar ground for a Pascoe to be toeing the line to a woman’s voice.

  ‘Everything that’s happened to them has been the grandma’s fault; but I suppose you have to make allowances, even there. She brought those three lads up single-handed after their father and mother died of the Spanish ‘flu. Pity she didn’t bring them up to something worth while. But she was too bitter, full of venom. When the word got round what sort of terms the Prudhoes had settled on young Sally, she nearly did her nut. She’d had it twice over, twice in a lifetime, that’s what she kept saying, and nobody had ever paid her a penny. Those lads with no parents, and before that it had been their father, that she’d had by a Volunteer that she’d never been able to trace.’

  ‘But by and large you’d say that Darkie was the only one who suffered lasting damage?’

  Hedges closed his eyes in expressible disgust. ‘Darkie? Darkie was the one with no bloody sense. He shouldn’t have become a criminal, Mr Kenworthy. There ought to be a Careers Board advising such people against it. He hadn’t the brains to pick a housewife’s shopping basket. And yet the other two went with him, till I got hold of Tommy, and that thin-lipped, razor-nosed bitch from Dagenham got behind Sammy. And with Darkie away most of the time, enjoying the hospitality of the tax-payer, between us we’ve just about kept their chins above water. But when I realised that there were new shennanikins afoot …’

  ‘What shennanikins?’ Kenworthy knew at once that he had been too sharp. Hedges stopped himself in mid-stream.

  ‘What shennanikins, Mr Hedges?’

  ‘All I mean is, when I heard that Darkie was out and about again.’

  ‘Did you know that this man Milner had arranged to meet Darkie somewhere in the old village?’

  ‘How was I to know a thing like that, Mr Kenworthy?’

  ‘Had you ever met Milner?’

  ‘Not unless he ever stopped here for petrol. And I don’t ask them their names. As to that, I’d read in the paper of his nonsense, years ago. But I can’t say I’d remembered his name. But when I filled Bob Whittle’s tank, three or four days ago …’

  ‘The Prudhoes’steward?’

  ‘I thought to myself, that bugger hasn’t come back just to see his cousins.’

  ‘He was asking questions, was he?’

  ‘He asked for petrol and I sold him some. He knows better than to ask me questions.’

  ‘But you think that he was in the district to ask some?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘I don’t know what goes on in people’s minds, Mr Kenworthy. Least of all the Prudhoes.’

  Kenworthy rounded things off quite suddenly. ‘I’ve often found, Mr Hedges, that after a talk like we’ve had, a man sometimes remembers things that he thinks he ought to have mentioned. Here is my telephone number, personal and direct, if you have any after-thoughts.’

  Hedges exchanged the compliment, a business card with the slogan Service before Self, from a small pack loose in a drawer.

  Kenworthy went out to his car. Tommy was serving another customer, his eyes fixed firmly on the pump as if expecting himself to be accused of giving short measure.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Not only is he not in a fit state to talk to you,’ Menschel said. ‘He’s no longer even talking to me. I’ll go so far as to say that when you were here before, he was pretty well in command of himself, except for the normal effects of shock. But in his present state of putting up a barrier against the world, he’s beginning to stand in very real danger.’

  ‘All the more reason why I want to be realistic about it. I promise you …’

  ‘Sorry, Chief Superintendent. He’s too heavily sedated.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what you do to them. He was just about to spill the beans to us when we were here before. And you had to haul him off to take his barbiturates.’

  ‘Largactil.’

  ‘Let’s not argue.’

  ‘In any case, I doubt whether he had much more to tell you. It seems to me you’d pretty well got into his confidence. Or, rather, your wife had.’

  ‘Touché.’

  They were in Menschel’s office again: the stethoscope on the desk, the photograph of his family, the window overlooking beech trees and squirrels.

  ‘Mr Kenworthy I do want to help, both you and Edward Milner, but I think there’s a total confluence of interests here.’

  Confluence: not one of Kenworthy’s own more usual words. Again, he was aware of the faint touch of accent in the psychiatrist’s speech. It made their previous interview seem a long time ago.

  ‘That’s true. I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘But it was bad enough for Milner to have witnessed that murder—to have handled the corpse and the knife—without having to be accused of the act.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. But the only way to exonerate him is to find out who did do it.’

  ‘Right and trite! How often have I found myself astride the law like this? And do you know, Chief Superintendent, I have in my time been known to serve both parties? Would you mind telling me, without bogging us down in too much detail, just how much he did tell you the other day?’

  ‘Willingly.’ Kenworthy turned back the pages of his notes. Menschel shifted his sparse and agile frame in his chair. Kenworthy dealt in staccato fashion with the main points.

  ‘Precisely,’ Menschel said. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, he seems to have told you, on balance, rather more than he told me. He seems to have been particularly expansive with you about what he saw from his turret.’

  ‘Nympholepsis,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘His orgasm in the clouds.’

  ‘We have a different word for it.’

  ‘You would.’

  ‘It probably amounts to the same thing. But Mr Kenworthy I think I see the solution. I’ll let you know the moment I think Edward Milner is ready for another consultation with your wife.’

  Kenworthy was taken aback.

  ‘Let him fancy that he is in love with her for a couple of hours,’ Menschel said. ‘I would think that your own position’s fairly safe.’

  ‘Dr Menschel, we shall have to play this very carefully.’

  ‘We always do.’

  Kenworthy was aware that there was something in the professional furnishing of the consultant’s room that was very alien to his own walk of life.

  ‘I don’t mean professional prudence, Doctor, at least not yours. Mine. You do appreciate that we are talking confidences on the threshold of an open court?’

  ‘I don’t think that worries me much.’

  ‘It does me. I can hardly have Mrs Kenworthy working for me at this stage.’ He forebore to mention what he hoped she was achieving in the other hospital.

  ‘Let her work for me, then.’

  ‘God, Doctor, I thought I was had enough.’ But the ellipsis was too bold for Menschel.

  ‘How, Chief Superintendent, bad enough?’

  ‘I thought I knew how to bend the rules.’

  ‘You bend them, Chief Superintendent, I make my own. Seriously: you do understand how little I can ever do for any of my patients? I can sometimes hope to put them in a position to help themselves. The first step is always to try to get them to tell us what is the matter with them. I think, now, that Mrs Kenworthy stands a better chance with Edward Milner than I do. He trusts her.’

  ‘And she won’t let’him down. To a much more mundane matter, Dr Menschel. Milner made a phone call from here.’

  ‘We have no hope of tracing that. I’ve tried. The Entrance Hall is always bristling with people. And it is true that the telephones are in arched alcoves that only give partial pr
ivacy. You can hear odd snatches, but only snatches. People have a habit of swinging about on their hips as they talk. And it is virtually impossible, unless it is so quiet that you can concentrate on counting the impulses, to tell what number a person is dialling.’

  I’d like to have a look, nevertheless.’

  ‘But certainly.’

  Menschel escorted him down the broad staircase of what had once been a country residence, of which the Hospital Board had done their best to retain the elegant tranquillity: tall, leaded windows, with a family crest that could mean nothing to anyone any more, and a mid-Victorian newel post at the bottom of the banister. But the effect was partially spoiled by odd trifles of institutional necessity: the red-ringed press-buttons of the fire-alarm system, a hand printed notice begging for cigarette ends to be placed in the receptacles provided. And there was a busy traffic of faintly alarming individuals: a Lady Macbeth who assumed that her co-pensionnaires could see the same things in the middle distance as she could. They all knew Menschel; they were all pleased to see him; he had a way of cutting short their conversation without rebuffing them.

  In the hall there were more of them: an old woman with her knees wide apart, knitting.

  Someone was in long converse at one of the two telephones. Kenworthy had to content himself for a long time with examining the other booth. There were graffiti, some of them perhaps of considerable therapeutic significance: others less exotic: a bathing beauty with Cupid’s bow lips. There were many notes of telephone numbers. There were heart-cries of love and hate, doodles of steam-rollers and windmills.

  Kenworthy looked, and sighed, as so often in his life, for inanimate evidence to surrender its key information. In a certain type of detective story, some off-duty academic would find some way of doing it: analysing grease-spots, classifying material for a monograph on ballpoint spirit inks.

  Kenworthy was looking for one particular number: but he would be the first to admit that he had no reason to be certain that Milner would have written anything down. He was conscious of Menschel, standing behind him, not crowding him, neither expectant nor unexpectant, ready to accept results without surprise or failure without contempt.