No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  In the neighbouring booth, a girl in a red ribbed jumper turned with the receiver held partially away from her ear, looked at Kenworthy without really noticing him. She returned to her conversation.

  ‘Well, no. Course not. Nobody ever tells you anything in here.’ She put down the receiver; began to look up another number.

  Menschel stepped towards her.

  ‘Do you mind, Deirdre? Just two minutes.’

  She pouted and moved aside, stretched out her arm for her bag after Kenworthy had moved into her place.

  It was the same mixture: no bathing belle, but a highly imaginative sphinx; more steam-rollers and windmills. There still wasn’t the number that Kenworthy was hoping for. Was it worth while isolating all the more recent jottings, assuming one could be sure of that, and looking them all up? There were cases in criminal history that had been cracked by application no less devoted. The front cover of the directory had been half torn away; someone had stood a hot mug of coffee on the exposed front page. Kenworthy picked up the book and fingered through its dog-eared pages.

  Threeways Garage, Pitney St Mary.

  The entry was in heavy type. Someone had made a little blue mark immediately to the left of it: a little blue mark made by a ballpoint pen, almost touching the letter T. It could conceivably be new. The back-room boys might have a way of finding out. But he wouldn’t bother them. It didn’t matter. It was inconclusive.

  But it made up his mind for him. ‘Thank you, Doctor, all yours. Deirdre.’

  ‘You’ve found something, Chief Superintendent?’

  ‘Enough to trigger off one of my more reckless assumptions.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘And I.’

  Menschel saw him out into the grounds: gorse, broom, beech trees, rhododendrons, squirrels.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Will you see Dr Julian Hammond, sir?’

  ‘At once, Sergeant. Bring him in, and stay yourself.’

  Sally’s son had come without being called. Kenworthy studied him for some seconds without dissimulation. He would never have recognised him as his mother’s boy: resemblance to his father was arguable but not spontaneously apparent. He had dark hair, dark eyes, a rather sallow complexion. His manner was polite, almost suave, but carefully uncommitted.

  ‘Have you heard how your mother is this morning?’

  ‘I dropped in for a few minutes on my way over here.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Low-spirited, with consequent clinical depression, but no immediate crisis. Your wife was with her and I wanted to ask you how official is that?’

  ‘One word from you, or from her immediate medical adviser, or from the ward sister, or from my superiors, who don’t yet know about it, incidentally, and she withdraws.’

  ‘I can’t see she’s doing any harm. But I don’t want my mother …’

  ‘There’s only one person who has the final word for your mother, Dr Hammond.’

  ‘And who’s that?’

  ‘Your mother.’

  Young Hammond had a mannerism of holding his head back and thrusting his chin forward. ‘That, Mr Kenworthy, is not wholly realistic. Fundamentally ill-informed. But it sounds good, and in spirit I find it admirable.’

  ‘What I mean is that I’m desperately anxious to hold back from anything remotely undesirable.’

  ‘Of course you are. But the point is, and the reason I have come to see you, is this man Milner.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Briefly. He has always been most pathetically anxious never to impinge on my share of visiting time. But that’s not what I want to say. Your continued presence here, the fact that you’re still treating this as an active case suggests that his guilt is not a foregone conclusion.’

  ‘The only conclusion about guilt is announced by the foreman of the jury.’

  ‘But you’re hoping that it’s someone else the jury will be considering?’

  ‘That’s roughly the state of affairs. Even as to the flavour of that word hoping.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. That’s what I wanted to know. He means a lot to my mother.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘I know,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘Oh, I know nothing about the man. Except that he flew over Yarrow Cross backwards whilst she was doing a balancing act on the window-sill.’

  ‘Strange things used to happen in Yarrow Cross.’

  Hammond smiled. ‘Yarrow Cross, from the Anglo-Saxon garw, meaning noisy. Noisy Cross. Very apt. Particularly nowadays. Well, as I said, I know virtually nothing about Edward Milner. In a way, I don’t even want to. The effect he has had on my mother suffices for me. After that accident, until Milner slowly asserted himself, she wasn’t even trying.’

  ‘You must have heard a lot about the old village as a boy.’

  ‘Practically nothing. Of course, I never lived in the old village. By the time I was born, the inhabitants had dispersed. As a community, they never came together again. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that they ever wanted to. There was some unrest, when the war was over, and the place was not returned to the people; but it nearly all came from outsiders: agitators, do-gooders, certainly not from those who would have had to up sticks again. They’d all settled to a new life, new homes, new jobs. They weren’t begging for another upheaval.

  ‘I heard stories: village catch-phrases, family jokes, but never a connected history.’

  ‘And personalities? The Pascoes?’

  ‘The only one I ever met was Tommy. He mended my bicycle punctures when I hadn’t time or couldn’t be bothered.’

  The phone rang. Sergeant Tabrett looked over at Kenworthy. ‘Sergeant Cottier.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  Julian Hammond put his hands on the arms of his chair. ‘I’ll wait outside?’

  ‘No. Stay. You might be able to tell me as much about this as Sergeant Cottier.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Cottier, Kenworthy here. Well, of course I don’t know how you’re going to tackle it. If I knew that, you wouldn’t be here. Well, you’ve got the insurance assessor’s report, and with a bit of grafting you might be able to go deeper into that than he did in the witness-box. And you’ve got the police reports. Oh, you have, have you? Well, that’s something positive, isn’t it? No, I know it’s no substitute for handling the thing itself. No; I don’t know any reason why they should. Must have gone to the scrap-heap years ago. No; I don’t want you to go near there, not till I give you the clearance. That won’t be till I’ve been there again myself. Yes, I do know what you’re here for. You’re here to do as you’re bloody well told, lad.’

  ‘You wanted me to hear that,’ Hammond said. ‘Mind if I tell you you’re wasting your time?’

  ‘Only too happy when someone’s keeping a weather-eye on the clock for me.’

  ‘Nothing to do with the car will advance your case for you. Just take the story you’ll have heard at its face value. My father—Brian Hammond, I’m talking about—was furious when Downtown Motors refused him a certificate. He went to Threeways. They gave him one. I’m quite sure they shouldn’t have done. Downtown were right. My mother thought so, too. She wanted to have the steerage overhauled. She offered the money, because he was always nearly broke: they used to housekeep and run their everyday lives on his income. It always peeved him to have to have recourse to her “special” income. She’s lying where she is because of his false pride. She told him so, as soon as she was coherent after the accident. She’s never forgiven him for it. That was what finally folded them up.

  ‘So, Mr Kenworthy, save your own and your sergeant’s time about that car. It won’t help my mother. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘To you perhaps. I’m going to be pressed to answer additional questions. But let us have the expert view of your mother’s prospects.’

  ‘Expert? I’m a mere beginner. But since you ask: if a patient can move one digit a mere inch, apply pressure of half an ounce to t
he square centimetre, there are machines we can devise to make life bearable: if a patient has enough mobility to cast a shadow on a photo-electric cell, we can put her in some command of her environment. My mother has more mobility than that, much more. But the basic question is whether one is a vegetable, or a vegetable with a mind and soul. She lost her mind and soul when she saw what that accident had done to her. It was Milner who found them again for her. That’s why I don’t care who or what he is. She only means to herself what she means to Milner.’

  ‘So what sort of a future do you see for them?’

  ‘Milner wants her to free herself to marry him. He wants to set her up in a flat, after future hospital training and using every penny of the capital he can raise and every pound that Disabled Persons Acts empower the community to spend on its chronically immobile. They would have every contrivance that’s technologically feasible, including a lot of experimental stuff.’

  ‘And you think that that would work?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know that nothing else could.’

  Kenworthy hesitated: then plunged. ‘And your adoptive father? You’re sure that’s finished?’

  ‘It’s been creaking for a long time. In my boyhood they were companionable. I think that was its zenith.’

  ‘Prudhoe?’

  ‘He settled his contract. He preferred his father’s philosophy. Serves him right if he’s stuck with it.’

  ‘So that if we don’t exonerate Milner …’

  ‘My mother will undoubtedly degenerate, and die. You won’t help her by solving a riddle about an MoT test.’

  Kenworthy turned to Sergeant Tabrett. ‘Contact that technical sergeant again. Tell him to concentrate on Downtown Motors.’

  Julian Hammond looked at him in bewilderment. ‘Well, it’s your pigeon. I hope I haven’t rubbed you up the wrong way?’

  ‘Not at all. I think we need to know everything. I’m not simply concerned with what people did; I’m interested in what they intended. Now back to Yarrow Cross. Past history.’

  ‘I’ve already pointed out, no narrative. A kaleidoscope of impressions, many of them undoubtedly misguided: what they used to sell in the village shop, what school life was like in those days, the village sports, the cricket supper.’

  ‘And personalities?’

  ‘Old Reynolds, the conventional comic poacher. The Pascoes …’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘They hated the Carvers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was one of those quarrels that went back so far both sides have probably forgotten.’

  ‘Your mother never said?’

  ‘How much can a son know about his mother under the surface? She never attempted to explain it. She hated them. So did my grandmother. And I knew both women well enough to respect their views.’

  ‘Tell me about your grandmother.’

  ‘She was an exceptional woman. Oh, I know I talk, don’t I, as if I’m convinced that we were an exceptional family. To tell you the simple truth, I think we were. Certainly not every small-holder’s daughter, growing up in the 1930s found her way to a university. That was due to her mother’s nurturing, as was the fact that she was able to hold her own when she got there. My grandmother had a certain silent confidence. I remember her, you know, I wasn’t very old when she died, but she’d made an impression. She had knowledge and I don’t mean book learning. You felt that there was a philosophy behind her, that she didn’t have to expound.’

  ‘You mean wisdom.’

  ‘I think so. It’s not a vogue word these days, is it?’

  ‘Wisdom suggests serenity. There doesn’t seem to have been much of that between them in the first year or two of your life.’

  ‘Women sharing a cooker.’

  ‘Is that all there was to it?’

  ‘You could hardly trust my impressions of those years.’

  ‘So. Mervyn Prudhoe. You’ve met him?’

  ‘I happened to be there on the one occasion he visited my mother in the ward. I’d tried to get my mother to talk about him, as soon as I knew the truth about myself. She hated him, of course, for what he’d done to her. Behind that, I think, she harboured a corner of over-romanticised memory. In what she told me, she was trying desperately to be fair. And to do that, she had to avoid saying very much.’

  ‘And your own judgment of him?’

  ‘I was interested, fascinated. You can imagine. He was extremely courteous, scrupulously correct, a little embarrassed, nervously taut. I went out of my way to show him that I wasn’t going to explode. I think he was genuinely interested in me, gave me a vague invitation to visit them in Wiltshire. Of course, I’ll never go. I had the feeling …’

  And nothing attracted Kenworthy so much as reluctance in a witness. He waited.

  ‘I had the feeling that he goes about permanently in a state of being ashamed of himself.’

  ‘Maybe he has reason enough for that.’

  ‘Maybe. For myself, I couldn’t care less. I have my own career, my own life. I’m not bothered by the past. Only the future, including my mother’s future. That’s why I’m here and at your disposal for anything you need. Though I hardly picture that I can be of much practical use.’

  Brisk, balanced, sure of himself. And how much uncertainty, self examination and torment did that mask?

  Kenworthy would like to have known. But there were a lot of things like that that did not matter much. When Hammond had gone he reached for a sheet of blank paper and drew a rapid sketch, bold and recognisable rather than artistic: a country cottage, lattice windows, a girl with hair about her shoulders; at the side of the house three match-stick men with spades.

  ‘That’s what it’s all about, Sergeant Tabrett. That’s the picture that was etched in Edward Milner’s brain, something he saw at a turning point in his life, something he couldn’t get away from, in concussion, unconsciousness, delirium. Any guesses?’

  Sergeant Tabrett was too careful to guess, far too careful.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tabrett was careful at their canteen lunch, too, because it was the first physical confrontation between Kenworthy and Sergeant Cottier. The technical sergeant had obviously been extremely and unguardedly rude to Kenworthy on the phone; a man, presumably, wrapped up in his own expertise, with cynical notions about a vaunted figure whom he had never met personally. So now was a moment of some sort of truth, across the shepherd’s pie and off-white boiled cabbage. Kenworthy was capable of anything, from pulling rank to his own particular searing brand of Schadenfreude.

  The two men met over the table as if nothing had occurred.

  ‘I’ve been to Downtown,’ Cottier said. ‘It didn’t take long.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The trouble is they’ve been talking about this for four years; and just started talking about it again, in a big way. It’s impossible to tell whether they’re remembering the original case-history, or some of the things they’ve said about it since.’

  ‘As ever.’

  ‘Apart from that, I can give you no evidence, but I’m certain in my own mind.’

  ‘I’ll settle for certainty.’

  ‘When that car went to Threeways for its second test, the steering was competent but liable to early breakdown. And it didn’t need any rustic thug to half pull the guts out of the thing to know that. There was play on a rocker-bar, and the mechanic I spoke to had been able to feel it with his spanner. So either Threeways knew they were putting a dangerous vehicle on the road or they just didn’t bother.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kenworthy said. ‘Go and fetch us three puddings, will you? I’ll have the rice.’

  He went back that afternoon, alone, to the Threeways. Blew in like a North African sirocco and closeted himself with Hedges and Pascoe in the office cubicle. Tommy remained standing, there were only two chairs.

  ‘All right, Hedges, you told me enough about yourself this morning for me to know what sort of businessman you are. Easy money wasn’
t it, the car Brian Hammond brought in? I’ve forgotten how many guineas you get for a statutory test; but you earned it for sweet sod-all, didn’t you? Because if Downtown Motors were prepared to pass it on all counts bar one, you weren’t going to blow labour-time doing it all again, were you? Brakes, lights, suspension had all been done for you, hadn’t it? Just have a look at the steering, Tommy, let’s know if you find anything amiss. And you didn’t, did you, Tommy? Didn’t go wasting your own or your boss’s time? What did you do, Tommy, drive it once round the forecourt?’

  Tommy, frightened, bovine, stood with his hands swinging idly in front of his thighs. ‘I tested it properly, I had the covers off.’

  ‘He did,’ Hedges interrupted. ‘I said he was to call one of us if he found anything that worried him.’

  ‘So what sort of a mechanic are you, Tommy? I know you’re not accredited; but there was nothing under that lid that was beyond you. So what, then? You knew; but it only belonged to the Hammonds, didn’t it, bugger them? Let those buggers slew across a kerb and fetch up against a lamp-post.’

  Hedges started to say something. Kenworthy silenced him with the sort of back-hand wave that forestalled argument.

  ‘Serve the buggers right, eh, Tommy?’

  Tommy stood silent, his eyes resenting the unaccountable intelligence of the world about him.

  ‘Serve them right for what, though? That’s what I want to know. What have you got against the Hammonds?’

  Tommy made an animal noise. He didn’t, of course, know what he had against them. They had always hated the Hammonds, he and his grandmother and his brothers. There were people you believed were against you, so you were against them. Things had never been different. It wasn’t a thing you ever questioned; it was there. It always had been.

  ‘The silly young bastard couldn’t even mend a puncture on his bike,’ he said.

  ‘A very good reason for sending his mother and father crashing into a tree.’

  ‘This is all supposition,’ Hedges said.

  ‘Not all, but if you’re wondering whether I’ve got enough evidence to bring this back into court, the answer is no, thank God, I haven’t. But if you open your bloody mouth again without an invitation, I might start trying. It’s Tommy who interests me at the moment, not you.’ He looked up and over at Tommy with exaggerated distaste. ‘So it was you, Tommy, that Edward Milner rang from the Mental Hospital?’