She turned over, shut out thoughts of cheerful Charlie and the problem of his daughters and drifted back into sleep.
It wasn’t long before the fat woman appeared again, still looking bloody ludicrous in tights. She began to prance about on a tightrope, which kept springing up and down. It sprang up once too often, and the female fatty was catapulted high into the air, turning somersaults. Then she began to spin slowly slowly down.
Tilly, of course, woke up again.
She fumed.
If Dan at that moment had had the lecherous gall to sneak in on her, Tilly would probably have done him the kind of injury that virile blokes don’t like thinking about.
Boots made Sammy and Tommy bring torches. When they were all in the car and it was heading for Camberwell Green, Tommy asked why Boots hadn’t mentioned a torch when he phoned.
‘It slipped my mind,’ said Boots.
‘You forgot, you mean?’ said Sammy. ‘You’re fallin’ apart.’
‘Sad, that is,’ said Tommy. ‘Never thought it would ’appen. Anyway, I’d like to be put in the picture.’
Driving through the junction into Camberwell Road, Boots explained why he’d come to the conclusion that their stepfather was in the hands of two men and a woman presently living in the house once occupied by the late Mrs Chivers and her daughter Elsie. Tommy said some conclusion, it was all pie in the sky. Sammy said never mind, let’s all have a look at the pie.
The night was empty of sounds, Camberwell Road empty of traffic except for Boots’s Riley. Street lamps cast their light over vacant pavements.
‘How do we get into the house?’ asked Tommy.
‘Do we knock and say we’ve come to empty the gas-meter?’ asked Sammy.
‘Not a very good idea, Sammy,’ said Boots. ‘Let’s see first if we can get into the yard and in through one of the back doors.’
‘Pardon me for mentionin’ it, but the back doors’ll be bolted if you’re right about these geezers holdin’ Dad there. So will the front door.’ Tommy had some thinking ability of his own. ‘And would yer mind tellin’ me how we’re goin’ to get into the yard in the first place?’
‘By way of the adjoining yard of the house next door,’ said Boots.
‘Are you thinkin’ that’s where me in-laws live?’ asked Sammy. ‘Only they don’t, they’re two doors away.’
‘No, I’m thinking of the house next door,’ said Boots. ‘I don’t know who lives there now, but every house had its latchcord in our day and few families drew it in at night or bolted the door.’
‘You’re goin’ to use the latchcord, walk through the passage to the back door by the kitchen, go into the yard and then climb over the ruddy wall?’ said Tommy.
‘Sounds all right,’ said Sammy.
‘Sounds a corker,’ said Tommy, ‘providin’ we don’t wake anyone up. Now I see why we’re wearin’ plimsolls.’
A bobby on his night beat, checking shop doors in the Walworth Road, gave the car a glance as it passed. An all-night tram, humming along from the direction of the Elephant and Castle, slowed and stopped at East Street. The bobby watched two people alight. Boots’s car travelled on to Browning Street.
‘I can point out,’ said Sammy, as Boots turned into Browning Street, ‘that the people livin’ in the next-door house are me in-laws’ neighbours, a quite decent bloke with two little girls.’
‘Well, suffer little girls to come quietly unto us if they wake up,’ said Boots, slowing down.
‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Tommy, ‘he’s playin’ Jesus now, Sammy.’
‘Don’t ask me where he gets it from,’ said Sammy, ‘ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
Boots changed into neutral as he entered Caulfield Place. He let the car run. It had just enough impetus to glide silently past the house that had once known Mrs Chivers and her daughter. It crawled to a stop beside the kerb. Its lights were out. Boots had switched them off before going into neutral gear.
Chinese Lady’s three stalwart sons sat in silence for a moment. Tommy broke it.
‘You still feel he’s got to be there, Boots?’ he whispered.
‘I still feel we’ve got to look,’ murmured Boots. ‘If he is there, it’ll be upstairs. Downstairs in these places is open house to neighbours. Right, let’s see if there’s a latchcord available to us at the house next door, and let’s hope we don’t come up against any bolted back doors if we manage to get into the yard that counts. If we do, we’ll have to force the kitchen window open. That’s going to be tricky, because there’s bound to be one man awake on watch. My only real worry is if they’ve already moved our stepdad out or didn’t actually bring him here, after all.’
‘What ’appens if we only find three people mindin’ their own business?’ asked Tommy, the whispered dialogue too low to be heard outside the car.
‘We’ll ask them if they’d like to buy three cricket stumps,’ said Boots. ‘But once we’re in we’ll make straight for the stairs. Go up with your feet well to one side. That’ll help to make sure the stairs won’t creak. There are three rooms. We’ll take one each, cricket stumps at the ready, torches switched on. That’s if there’s no sign of them having an all-night game of cards in the kitchen. Got it?’
‘Got it, Boots,’ said Tommy.
‘You can read the lesson next time Chinese Lady makes us all go to church,’ said Sammy.
They alighted carefully from the car then, closing the doors silently by retracting the locks. Boots led the way, with each of them carrying a torch and a cricket stump. Reaching the front door of Dan Rogers’s house, Boots felt for a latchcord and found one. Despite the overall tension, he allowed himself a little smile. The street, a cul-de-sac, offered not a sound. It was essential for the opening of the door to be just as soundless. The man who lived here might be as decent a bloke as Sammy had said, and his two little girls might be cherubs, but if they were woken up by intruders at this time of night, uproar would follow.
Boots applied a slow cautious pull. The latch moved, the door opened and the night air of the street silently entered the passage. Neither the stairs nor the floor were visible, but Boots and his brothers knew the layout of these Victorian terraced houses as well as they knew whose face was which. Boots let the latch ride slowly back into place, then stepped in. Tommy followed, Sammy after him. They paused to listen.
In the downstairs bedroom, Dan was sleeping the sleep of a man whose ownership of two precocious infants made him feel he couldn’t ask for much more, apart from a marriage certificate. His sleep, therefore, was less disturbed than Tilly’s, for Tilly, much to her disgust, was worrying far more about that certificate than he was. In the bedroom next to hers, Bubbles and Penny-Farving slept like perfect cherubs. Tilly, for her part, turned over again.
Hearing nothing, Sammy closed the door very quietly. Something, however, made Tilly sit up. Boots and his brothers ghosted noiselessly through the passage to the back door that was next to the kitchen, the door dustmen used to get into back yards to pick up dustbins. Again the intruders paused to listen. Upstairs, the shapely lodger, a young woman with a warm heart and formidable spirit, sat in her bed, listening. She thought she might have heard one of the girls sigh aloud in her sleep. The poor mites both had something to sigh about. But it was probably her subconscious that had been disturbed by the sighing intrusion of night air through the open front door. Hearing nothing more, Tilly sank back, turned on her side, put her face into the pillow and sought new slumber in the hope that if the female fatty appeared again, she’d fall off her tightrope and break her neck.
Boots groped for the door handle. He turned it, gently pulled, and the door opened. He smiled again. Locked or bolted doors were foreign to Walworth families. He stepped into the dark yard, the June night soft and balmy, the air free of the sooty elements of winter. Tommy and Sammy followed, Sammy again making himself responsible for the quiet closure of a door. It meant they’d left no trace of their intrusion.
The rooftops of the cluster
ed houses, swallowed up by the moonless sky, were invisible. Not so the very faint light touching a blind drawn down over the window of the bedroom above the kitchen of the adjoining house, the house that counted. It was the darkness itself that made such a faint light perceptible. Boots touched Tommy’s arm and pointed. Tommy looked up, and so did Sammy, and all three brothers took in the fact that there was a tiny light in the room shielded by the blind. They knew which room it was, the upstairs back. They knew too, without having to say so, that if Chinese Lady’s better half was in that house, he was almost certainly in that particular room.
Sammy and Tommy left the next move to Boots. He gave his torch and stump to Tommy, placed his hands on the top of the thick dividing wall, and levered himself up. Over he went, landing on his plimsolled feet. Tommy handed him two stumps and two torches, then up and over he went too, with no more sound than that made by clothes and body brushing stone. Sammy followed, and all three of them moved to the back door that was to the left of the kitchen. They moved with extra caution, nail-bitingly conscious of the need to avoid touching any obstacles. A switched-on torch would have helped, but now was not the time to show a beam of light.
Boots, reaching the door, tried the handle. It turned, but the door failed to yield. It was bolted. That, thought Boots, was either unusual or, if dirty work was going on, not unexpected. He said nothing. He began to move again, along the yard to the back door of the scullery, Tommy and Sammy behind him. If Sammy considered himself a businessman with a sharp eye, and Tommy considered himself a bloke who could master the mechanics of machines, they rarely failed to allow Boots the initiative in matters seriously affecting the family.
Tommy’s foot brushed a running rat. He was conscious of the contact, light though it was, and he froze for a moment, though not because he knew the thing was a rat. No sound ensued. Boots reached the scullery door. Again they all paused, ears acutely alert. Boots found the handle after a few moments and slowly turned it. The door opened. Silence greeted them. Boots did not consider this a time to dwell on memories, but they rushed into his mind all the same. Here was what had once been the home of an acidulous, complaining mother and her gentle-mannered daughter whose soft myopic eyes hid her need to be a living breathing woman. If he had loved anyone when he was young, it had been Elsie Chivers, despite her age being well in advance of his. Time had not erased the affection he still felt for her.
Tommy nudged him. The light of a torch was necessary now. Boots knew the three of them could not negotiate the scullery and the kitchen in this kind of darkness. The kitchen would be full of obstacles. Would it also contain a watchdog? He thought not. His feeling that Edwin Finch was here strengthened, for a parrot that paid a tribute to Adolf Hitler, star of the increasingly powerful Naxi organization in Germany, was a bird that had heard it from the lips of a German, surely. And it was Germans, of all people, who might claim the right to quarrel with a man who had once been a singularly successful German spy.
Boots stepped into the scullery and, transferring his stump from his left hand to his right, he switched on the torch, retained in his left hand. The beam of light guided him. He turned left into the kitchen, Tommy and Sammy close behind him. The torchlight revealed a table and chairs. On the table stood a hooded birdcage. Boots took the light away from the cage and noted that the door to the passage was open. Now, he thought, where does the woman sleep? Upstairs with one of the men? Cassie had said one man was her husband, the other her brother-in-law. All the same, he had to assume the downstairs bedroom might be occupied, even if both men were upstairs. Leaving the kitchen, with Tommy and Sammy still close behind him, he switched off the torch. The ascending banisters were on his right, the bedroom on his left. Inside, in her bed, Mrs Harper, the bitter daughter of a semi-crippled German father, slept heavily, her breathing slightly bubbly. If the two men wanted her for anything in a hurry, one would come down and wake her. That had not happened yet, neither tonight nor last night. The prisoner’s behaviour had been completely untroublesome. Lucky for him, or he might have got his arm broken. In her sleep, the woman was triumphant and ghost-free as Chinese Lady’s quiet-footed sons passed her door. They turned in the passage and faced the stairs. The silence could have denoted that every occupant was asleep.
Problem, thought Boots. Should he change his idea about all three of them committing themselves to the upstairs rooms? Would the woman be in this downstairs bedroom with one of the men? No, not on your life. If they had Edwin here, then both men would be close to him, one man with him, watching him, the other resting or sleeping in an adjacent room.
Boots began a slow careful ascent of the stairs, keeping close to the wall. Tommy and Sammy followed, each with a cricket stump in his right hand, a torch in his left. Despite their slow careful tread, a stair faintly creaked, and they checked and held their breath as they clearly heard the feet of a chair scraping lino. But it was a natural sound, made by someone getting up or by shifting the chair, someone with no awareness that a stair had lightly creaked. Bless me lawful wedded wife and her agitated boz, thought Sammy, there is a bloke up there who’s awake in the middle of the night, and what’s he awake for when honest Walworth citizens should be asleep? Unless they’re nightwatchmen.
They tensed to complete stillness as the door to the upstairs back opened. They discerned light, small light, the light of a candle, and out of the room walked a man. Tommy took a tighter grip of his cricket stump. The man went straight to the lavatory on the landing, opened the door and walked in. The door closed.
Boots moved fast. The opportunity couldn’t have been sweeter if it had been the result of one of Chinese Lady’s prayers. Up he went, and up went Tommy and Sammy. On went their torches. Boots ran into the back room, Sammy into the front, Tommy into the middle, all doors being open. Boots saw who was in the back room, his stepfather, legs chained. Mr Finch came awake.
‘Won’t be a tick,’ said Boots, and out he went, just as the lavatory chain was pulled. Sammy came out of the front bedroom, the beam of his torch running ahead of him. It preceded him into the middle room, where Tommy, beside the bed, had his cricket stump angled, its point planted in the chest of a man lying recumbent in the bed, blanket drawn back. The man’s face was a study in astonishment edged with fury.
‘Don’t move, mate,’ said Tommy, ‘or I’ll make a nasty hole in yer armoury.’
‘Don’t make him bleed,’ said Sammy, ‘it’s messy. Hope we haven’t hit a blank.’ Out he went. Boots was on the landing. Framed in the open lavatory door was a tall, square-shouldered man, the beam from Boots’s torch flooding his livid face.
‘Fair cop, I think,’ said Boots. The man’s right arm executed a lighting-fast movement, and down came his hand to chop. It hit a cricket stump raised in a movement just as fast. The stump cracked and split, but the impact of hand against hard wood instead of the side of a neck broke fingers.
‘You ruddy ’ooligan,’ said Sammy, and hit the man in the solar plexus. He doubled up. ‘How we doin’, Boots?’ asked Sammy.
‘Not bad,’ said Boots, watching the groaning man.
‘But what’ve we got out of it?’ asked Sammy. ‘Who’s in there?’ He pointed his torch at the back room. ‘Anyone?’
‘Yes,’ said Boots, ‘your Ma’s better half.’
‘Well, I’ll admit it,’ said Sammy, making for the room, ‘you ain’t just a pretty face, Boots.’
Mrs Harper slept on.
Chapter Twenty
EMILY WAS ON her third pot of tea. I’ll be awash in a minute, she thought, and then it’ll be sink or swim. Still, if I go back to bed I don’t suppose I’ll get to sleep. I mean, how can Boots possibly think his stepdad is actually being held in that house where that witch, old Mrs Chivers, used to live? Oh, now I’d better do penitence or something for speaking ill of the dead. I hope all this tea isn’t making me drunk. Oh, gawd, look at the time, it’s gone two.
The kitchen door opened and Rosie looked in.
‘I knew it,�
� she said, ‘you’re still up, Mum.’ Wearing her nightie, she came in.
‘Rosie, go back to bed,’ said Emily, ‘you’ve got school in the mornin’.’
‘Oh, I keep waking up,’ said Rosie, and sat down at the table. ‘I’ll have some of the tea if it’s still hot, may I?’
‘You really ought to go back to bed, lovey,’ said Emily, dark-auburn hair glinting with touches of fire, ‘or you won’t be fit for school.’
‘Oh, I never suffer morning tiredness,’ said Rosie, pouring herself some tea and modestly sugaring it. ‘Mum, you’re sitting and waiting for Daddy, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sittin’ and waitin’ in the hope that your grandpa’s goin’ to come home to your grandma.’
‘Well, he will,’ said Rosie, ‘he and Daddy will arrive together.’
‘Rosie, we can’t be sure of that.’
‘Daddy’s sure,’ said Rosie.
‘No, he isn’t,’ said Emily.
‘Well, I am,’ said Rosie.
‘You shouldn’t expect too much from Boots,’ said Emily, ‘he’s only gone to Walworth in hope.’
‘Mummy, we’ve got to have faith,’ said Rosie. ‘Nana’s got faith. That’s why she went to bed and didn’t stay up drinking tea.’
‘She went to bed because she was all worn out,’ said Emily, ‘and, anyway, if you’ve got faith yourself, what made you keep wakin’ up?’
‘Excitement,’ said Rosie. ‘I’d have a piece of cake if I didn’t feel excited. Were you able to eat cake on your wedding day?’
‘Lor’, what a question,’ said Emily. ‘I can’t remember if I did or not.’
‘Did Daddy have lots of girlfriends before he became engaged to you?’
‘Well, I’m blessed,’ said Emily, ‘don’t tell me you came down ’ere to ask me these kind of questions, you funny girl.’
‘But I like knowing all about you and Daddy.’
‘You’re at the age of curiosity, you are,’ said Emily, fidgeting and giving the kitchen clock another look.
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