Plender

by Ted Lewis

  “Dinner, eh?”

  I’m not the type to be invited to dinner, that’s what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Froy, I thought. That’s what the eyebrows are for.

  “Yes,” I said. “An old school chum.”

  “Which one?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Which school?”

  I told him the name of the grammar school.

  “Oh, I see,” said Froy, although he’d known all along.

  You bloody old bastard, I thought. Just you wait, you old woman. Just you bloody well wait.

  “It’s sort of old boys’ reunion,” I said.

  “Really?” said Froy. “By the way, have you seen the evening paper?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “There’s an item about the proprietor of Peggy’s Bar. I thought you’d have seen it. He was found dead last night.”

  “Oh yes?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Nasty business. Hanged himself in his own flat. Used a stocking.” “A stocking?” I said.

  “Yes, well you know what these people are like. Apparently he left a note. Typed, of course. Something about him not able to carry on. Carry on—the way he was, one assumes.”

  “Well, some of them do get like that in their old age,” I said, looking at Froy.

  Froy took another drink.

  “Well, oh well,” I said. “Old Peggy. That place just won’t be the same without him. Did you ever get in there, Mr. Froy?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “What I was driving at . . . well, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about the . . . er, the circumstances, would you, Plender?”

  “The circumstances?”

  “Well, I understand you use the place as a rendezvous for certain aspects of our activities. I just wondered if perhaps in one way or another . . .”

  “It’s as big a surprise to me as it is to you, Mr. Froy.”

  “I hope so,” said Froy. “You know what the position is if anything should go wrong at your end.”

  “Mr. Froy,” I said. “Don’t worry. I know nothing.”

  “I suggest, though,” he said, “that in any case it might be better to make different arrangements in the light of what’s happened. The police are bound to be around for a time and it’s better not to interfere with them too much at that level.”

  “Of course, Mr. Froy.”

  “Now, I must be off,” he said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  KNOTT

  I stood in the dressing room, shaving with my electric razor. Kate was in the bedroom, sitting in front of her dressing table making her face up.

  I stared into my own eyes as I pushed the razor round my face. My pupils were like pin-pricks and my face looked more bony than it had looked for years. My mouth was turned down at the edges in a kind of manic grimace. It was at a time like this, when I had to look at myself and see what I was, that the memories of what had happened pressed on me from the inside, bursting to get out. I wondered how much longer my frame could bear it, how much longer it would go on, when the finale would come. The finale. What did that mean? The police? Prison? What would I feel? Relief? Or would this supernormal anxiety state persist indefinitely? Perhaps Eileen would never be found. Perhaps the police would never walk up the drive to my front door. And what would that mean? A lifetime of little favours for Plender? To have him constantly on the phone to me, asking this, asking that? Which would be worse?

  I stopped shaving and unplugged my razor and went through into the bedroom. Kate was still sitting at the dressing table.

  I walked over to her and stood behind her.

  “Kate,” I said.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and squeezed. She froze under my grip. I sank down on to my knees and buried my face in her back. The smell of her body brought tears to my eyes.

  “Kate,” I said. “Kate. What am I going to do?”

  She turned round on her stool and I pushed my face into her lap. She was still stiff and I realised that my present actions would only endorse her disbelief; she would take them as proof of my unfaithfulness. My inability to control myself had made matters worse. And I’d caused Kate to panic too, to make her think the non-existent affair was far more serious than she’d imagined because suddenly the tenseness left her and was replaced by a shuddering apprehension . . . and she said, “Peter. Tell me. What is it?”

  Christ. What was I going to say?

  “Peter, you must tell me.”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “What, Peter?”

  “It’s just that I can’t bear you not believing me. I can’t bear that you think I’m lying.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You must believe me,” I said. “I’m telling the truth.”

  I felt her fingers tentatively touch my hair. I began to pull her towards me, down to the floor. She didn’t resist but her movements told me she was on the verge of being convinced, that she was hoping she could believe me.

  Now she was on the floor with me and I rolled on top of her, pretending passion, pushing her underskirt up to her waist, pulling at her straps, feeling her between her legs.

  She reacted with a terrific suddenness. She was all over me, biting, kissing, her grip on me frantically violent, her legs thrashing up and down the length of my body, her whole body spasmodically arching and relaxing in turn. She pushed me on to my back and squirmed on top of me, kissing me, mouth wide open, blinding me with her soft dark hair, pressing her knee between my legs.

  I had to stop her. Plender would be here soon.

  I took hold of her by the shoulders and with great difficulty pushed upwards. Her hair drifted across my face and tickled my mouth and she took hold of my wrists and jerked my hands away and pressed down on me again, pinning my arms above my head, almost suffocating me with her interminable kisses. Eventually I managed to swivel my head to one side and said, “Kate, we must stop. The time.”

  She shook her head and began to try to kiss me again.

  “Plender,” I said. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  Kate stiffened again and then eventually relaxed and rolled over on to her back.

  “Later,” I said, taking hold of her hand. “When he’s gone.”

  Kate lay there for a minute and then abruptly she got up and straightened herself and sat down again at the dressing table. I remained where I was, lying on my back on the floor.

  PLENDER

  “What does a detective do?” I said, looking at Knott’s wife, drawing on my cigar. “It’s funny, everybody asks that. Peter asked me the other night, didn’t you, Peter?”

  Knott nodded.

  “Have some more brandy,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. I looked at Knott’s wife again. “Well, what do you think he does, Kate?”

  Knott poured me some more brandy trying not to appear too drunk. His wife said, “And me, Peter. I’ll have some more too.”

  She pushed a strand of dark hair off her face and picked up her glass and offered it to Knott, her elbow on the table, her other hand supporting her chin. Knott gave her some brandy and she took a sip and said, “Darling, while you’re up, give me a cigarette.”

  It was all for me. I knew that. It had been all evening. She’d been giving me those big brown eyes all night. And Knott knew it too. His wife thought he was having an affair, so what could he do about it?

  I stretched out in my chair and placed my hands above my head.

  “Come on,” I said. “What do you think a private detective does?”

  Knott lit his wife’s cigarette and she inhaled and blew smoke across the table and leant back in her seat the way I was doing except that she folded her arms across her breasts and with the fingers that held her cigarette sh
e scratched one of her arms just below the shoulder.

  “What do I think a private detective does?” she said. “You mean apart from stealing about the grounds of old friends’ houses at dead of night and making off with their cars?”

  “Not fair,” I said. (Gurney always used those words whenever he protested anything.) “That wasn’t business. That was in the way of being a favour. Wasn’t it, Peter?”

  He nodded, not looking at me.

  “All right,” she said. “Point taken. But you knew how to get into it, how to start it without the key, and how to get it out of the garage and down the drive without waking a soul. Presumably you can count those as business methods?”

  “True,” I said, “true.”

  “And so what aspect of your business entails knowing how to break and enter and steal a car?”

  “You’re supposed to be telling me,” I said, smiling.

  “Yes, I am, aren’t I,” she said. “Well, now, let’s see. On television—”

  “Television!”

  “On television, they don’t seem to do anything very much except get beaten up and leap in and out of girls’ bedrooms. And of course always producing a gun at precisely the right moment. Is that the way you do your business, Brian?”

  “If I did then I’d need an awful lot of money in the bank to start with. Because I’m damned sure I’d never make any.”

  “So you’re in it for the money?”

  “What else?”

  “You’re not a crusader?”

  “You’re back on television again.”

  “All right. Describe the case you’re working on at the moment. You do call them cases, don’t you?”

  Knott said, “Perhaps Brian doesn’t really want to talk about it, darling.”

  Knott’s wife twisted her head right round to look at him squarely in the face.

  “You mean like a doctor or a lawyer? For ethical reasons?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s for Brian to say.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “It would only be wrong if I used any names.”

  I took a sip of my brandy.

  “Well, for instance, recently there was a man who came into my office who was being blackmailed. He was in a fairly prominent position in local government and he didn’t want to go to the police.”

  “I thought the police always said that if a blackmailer was turned over to them they wouldn’t press any charges against whoever it was who was being blackmailed?”

  “Depends what the person had done, really.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Well supposing you were being blackmailed because you’d put arsenic in Peter’s cornflakes. You couldn’t really expect the boys in blue to cock a deaf ‘un, could you?”

  I looked at Knott out of the corner of my eye. He was reaching for the brandy decanter.

  “I suppose not.”

  “Quite.”

  “And this man you’re talking about . . .”

  “Sorry,” I said. “No details.”

  “Kate,” Knott said, “I’m sure Brian’s only being polite. He doesn’t really want to answer your questions.”

  “That, as you said earlier,” she said, “is for Brian to say.”

  “No, really. I don’t mind,” I said, smiling as she gave her husband an ever-so-sweet I-told-you-so smile. “Anyway, this chap, as I said, didn’t want to go to the Law, so he asked me to find out who it was who was bleeding him. Nothing to it. I just followed the man from where he picked up the loot, found out who he was from where he lived and did a little bit of checking up. Then I arranged a meeting, accidentally on purpose like, and let him know what I knew. And that the Law wouldn’t mind knowing either. And so he laid off.”

  “The blackmailer blackmailed,” said Knott’s wife.

  “Something like that,” I said, looking at Knott. Knott looked the colour of white fish.

  “Actually,” she said, “it must be an awful feeling being blackmailed. Just living from week to week and knowing when the money runs out you’re finished. And the blackmailer. He must be really horrible, a real bully at heart.”

  “Terrible,” I said.

  Knott got up from the table and said, “Why don’t we all go into the lounge?”

  KNOTT

  It was cool and quiet in the kitchen.

  I sat down at the breakfast bar and held my glass with both hands and closed my eyes. No Kate, no Plender, no chat, no questions, no guilt. Just the quietness of the kitchen.

  I sat there for a full five minutes, not thinking. Then Kate came into the kitchen.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” she said.

  “I felt a bit off,” I said.

  “Hardly surprising,” she said. “Anyway, I’m going to make some coffee. You’d better go in there and entertain Brian.”

  I threw back my head to laugh but no laughter came.

  “What’s the matter?” said Kate.

  I shook my head and slid off the stool and went back into the lounge.

  Plender was sprawled out on the settee, smoking a cigarette, his glass full of brandy.

  “Feeling all right?” he said when he saw me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I felt a bit off for a few minutes but it’s passed.”

  “Good,” Plender said. “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  I sat down opposite him. He was really making a meal of it. Really living out his invitation to the full.

  “You know,” he said, indicating the room with the hand that held his glass, “this really is very nice. Very nice indeed. I mean, it looked nice from outside, but it’s even nicer inside. The outside doesn’t do it justice. I mean, you can tell from the outside how nice it’s going to be, but you’d never think it’d be quite as nice as this. Is it you or the wife?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You or the wife. The décor. The way it’s done out?”

  “Oh. Both of us, I suppose.”

  “Well I must say you’ve done a very nice job, both of you. Mind you, I admire your taste particularly.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes, yours. The missus. She’s a little cracker. A real darling.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’ve really done all right for yourself, Peter. And it’s very nice to see it. Mind you, it was always on the cards. You always had that air about you. That you’d make good. Everybody recognised it. Even the lads at school, in the old gang. It stuck out a mile.”

  I drained my glass and got up to pour myself another drink.

  “I wonder what happened to them all,” Plender said. “Are you ever in touch with any of them, Peter?”

  “Who?”

  “The old gang. Do you ever hear of any of them?”

  “No.”

  “I would have thought maybe your mother would have kept you posted.”

  I shook my head.

  “I wonder what happened to them all,” he said. “I’d really like to know. Here, do you remember old Mouncey?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you remember that time you and him got my General Book and rubbed my history homework out?”

  Kate came in with the coffee.

  “What’s all this?” she said, putting the tray down. “Old times?”

  Plender laughed. Kate began to pour the coffee, bending over the coffee table, her back to Plender. He was able to look right up her skirt. He knew I’d noticed, but he didn’t stop.

  “No, not really,” he said. “I was just asking Peter if he remembered this particular time when he and another lad rubbed my homework out.”

  “Did what?”

  Kate gave Plender his coffee and sat down next
to him on the settee.

  “It was really very funny,” said Plender. “I’d been in trouble with the history master for not doing my homework. I wasn’t like Peter, all industrious. Anyway, old Jepson, he was the history master, said that the next time I failed to produce a full and complete piece of homework, I was for the high jump. He’d take me to the Headmaster. Well, I wasn’t in his good books, either, because one or two of the staff had been on to him about the same thing, homework, and he was one of those characters who believed that if you didn’t use the facilities the school provided, adopt the right attitude, all that junk, then you had no right to be there. So of course I didn’t want to get kicked out, so I went home that night and did the biggest and best piece of homework I’d ever done in my life. Something about the repeal of the Corn Laws, I think it was. Anyway, as it happened, it wasn’t a Best Books exercise, it was General Books only, and you could write in pencil in General Books. So when I got to school next morning there was a big crowd waiting for me at the gate because it had got around that I was for the chop if I didn’t do my homework and of course everybody thought that I wouldn’t have. Everybody was amazed that I had done it. Anyway, history was first period after break . . . you tell it, Peter. Tell Kate what you and Mouncey did.”

  Kate was looking at me, her face blank of expression. I said, “Well, there’s nothing to tell really.”

  “Go on, Peter,” said Kate.

  I got up.

  “Well, there’s nothing, except, as Brian says, Mouncey and I rubbed his homework out.”

  “All six pages of it,” said Plender, laughing. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course, I didn’t check it when I got back in from break. As you didn’t hand in General Book homework, what Old Jepson usually did was to get everybody to open their books at where their homework was written down and then he’d go by each desk and have a look, and when he’d done that he’d select one or two people to read out what they’d written. Which he did in this case. So I opened my book at the place where I’d done it, and there it was, gone. I really couldn’t believe it. You can’t imagine the panic I was in. I scrabbled through the pages in case I’d made a mistake, and of course all that did was to make matters worse as far as Jepson was concerned. He just thought I was trying to break the ice before he got to me. And when he did get to me, all I could say was, ‘Well, it was there before break, sir’; you can imagine what happened. He hit the roof. Yanked me out of my seat by the scruff of my neck and marched me off to the Headmaster’s office. God, what a laugh.”