They Never Looked Inside

by Michael Gilbert

Well, that was fair enough. Only mugs wandered about the streets in the small hours; it was asking to be picked up by a nosey slop looking for promotion. But it left a lot of time to kill. Then again, Stumpi might be okay – the boys said he was – and again he might not. He sat blinking at them from behind the corner table, apparently unwearied by his all-night session.

  On an impulse Rod got to his feet and asked: “Where’s the Gents?” Stumpi nodded at a curtained recess at the back. Rod found the filthy little water closet, and found something more: a door, leading out to a pint-sized area with an iron staircase. The door was bolted. Rod unbolted it. He made his way back to the shop and as he put his hand up to pull the curtain aside a great many things seemed to happen at once.

  The first thing his eye caught, through the steamy front window, was the bonnet of a large black car, coasting to a standstill. Then the shop front seemed to irrupt as huge figures tumbled through the door. He saw Gunner on his feet swinging a chair and the crash of splintering wood was in his ears as he made the back door. A second later he was in the area and up the steps. A quick look showed him the street was empty.

  Fast as his young legs carried him, a more elderly pair of legs was moving faster still. Hazlerigg had grasped the fact that one of his birds had flown and was round in his tracks and out of the door before Gunner had finished swinging his first chair.

  Without stopping to open the door of the car he pushed his head and shoulders through the side window and seized the radio headset. “Hullo Three, hullo Four. Close on Cambridge Circus. Move fast.” The set crackled. “Hullo Three—move from Cambridge Circus down Shaftesbury Avenue—watch your left. Hullo Four—move from Cambridge Circus down Charing Cross Road. Watch your right. Look out for a youth: medium height, wearing no hat or coat. That is all. Acknowledge.”

  As a result of these energetic measures, when Rod paused at the corner of Gerrard Street, he saved himself, for the second time, only by the quickness of his wits. He saw the police car a fraction of a second before it could have seen him, and turned on his tracks. Two minutes later he peered cautiously out of Newport Passage and realised the nature of the trap which was holding him.

  His mind was still working. He had noticed, at the top end of Newport Passage, a row of tenement flats with a communal basement passage. Down into this he climbed. Stooping in the shadows he loosened the buckle under his coat and wriggled clear of the heavy satchel. Quietly he picked off the top of the nearest of the many dustbins and dropped it in. As quietly he put the lid back.

  Then on hands and knees he crawled for the full length of the passage. There was a door at the end. It opened to his touch.

  He found himself in a sort of connecting subway which ran under the tenement from Newport Passage to the fronting street. It was pitch dark and from its smell contained a further selection of refuse bins. But the sweetest-smelling haven could not have been more welcome.

  The door had a bolt and he shot it gently, before moving cautiously forward among the empty milk bottles. The door at the other end, he found, was already locked. He sat down to wait.

  V

  An hour later Hazlerigg called off his cordon. Half an hour after it had gone Rod slipped out. He had no means of knowing whether the way was clear or not, but an irrational feeling possessed him that his luck would hold. He recovered the satchel and disappeared circumspectly in the general direction of Seven Dials.

  2

  “W’s The Warrior, Home From The Wars”

  Major Angus McCann was sitting in the padded splendour of a celebrated West End Hotel. He was in a mood of roaring Bolshevism which far exceeded anything under the mere general heading of being “browned off “. Such a description was infinitely too tame and neutral.

  It was the evening of his second day in England. Behind him lay six completed years of soldiering in the Commandos. He had spent a colourful fortnight in Norway in early 1940, and had sniffed at unguarded portions of the coast of France. He had gone out to North Africa in 1942 and later had dropped into the sea off the coast of Sicily and had lived to bless his peace-time love of long-distance swimming. At the end of 1943 he had returned to England and spent a glorious six months assaulting, in working hours, the larger landed estates in the South Midlands (this was known as “intensive training”) and wrecking many of the stately homes of England in a series of stupendous guest-nights. Finally, one day in early June of 1944, he had landed in Normandy and had marched to that celebrated bridge “where, to the sound of the pipes, the green berets and the red berets had met and intermingled.”

  The familiar spirit which had preserved his skin in these fantastic episodes was now to be worked overtime, and had stepped in with a judicious bout of jaundice, severe enough to keep him out of the area of the Arnhem salient altogether. After that things had gone smoothly enough and he had been in no real danger until the week following the Armistice when he had tried to argue with a drunken Russian soldier in one of Berlin’s border-line restaurants.

  Fortunately his ability to get under a table had exceeded the Russian’s ability to find his automatic pistol, and all had been smoothed over.

  He ordered another glass of beer and tried to look happy when asked to pay two shillings for it.

  Farther along the bar he observed two girls who appeared to be taking a great deal of time over their first drinks, and he entertained the unworthy suspicion that they were waiting for a good Samaritan to come and stand them the next one.

  “Let ‘em wait,” said Major McCann ungallantly. (Actually they were school teachers from Saffron Walden engaged in seeing the night life of London. The blonde one taught Geography and the brunette took Physical Training. They drank their pink gins slowly because they disliked the taste of them. They will not appear again in this story.)

  Major McCann imbibed some more beer. He was honest enough to realise that he himself was very largely to blame for his own feelings. He had little of substance to complain about. He was sound in wind and limb. He had somewhere to live. He had a little money.

  He shared a flat with a very much elder sister, in the wilds of North Hampstead. She was an excellent cook and a thoroughly good “manager”. His bed was so soft and the sheets so exquisitely aired and laundered that he had scarcely slept a wink on his first night at home. True, she was not a sparkling conversationalist and it would have been a stretch of the imagination to have described her as a kindred spirit, her main interests being afternoon bridge and British Israel.

  She had displayed an altogether unexpected interest in her brother’s activities in Egypt and he had been agreeably surprised thereat until it transpired that her sustaining hope had been that he might have secured some accurate measurements of the great pyramid. (They were, he gathered, connected in a vague but important way with the future of the United Nations and the development of atomic energy.)

  Again he reminded himself with great fairness that it was unreasonable to be angry with anyone for being themselves and not someone else altogether. She had many excellent qualities, had survived the bombing and rocketing without stirring an inch from her appointed way of life, had undergone undoubted hardships, and had, by her own unaided efforts, saved two and a half tons of waste paper. There must be many worse people in London. Indeed, at that moment two of them came in. Major McCann felt his hackles rise as he viewed the newcomers, a man and a woman.

  The man, he felt sure, was a stockbroker, and equally he felt sure that he was known to his friends as “The Major” (1914-18 vintage). His considerable body was too tightly encased in a suit which contrived to out-savile Savile Row and his startlingly pig-like face appeared at first sight to be a healthy brick-red; it was only on closer inspection that it became evident that this colour was produced by numberless little scarlet threads, the finger-prints left by high living and much old brandy. He was wearing the tie of a very well-known cricket club. His companion was a lacquered job, very partially dressed in that shade of jet satin best calculated to set off a dead white
skin (or alternatively, thought McCann, the dead white skin had been superimposed as best calculated to show off the jet satin – in those days of coupons it was difficult to tell where art ended and economy began).

  They were so perfectly suited to each other and to their present surroundings that it would have caused him no surprise had they headed a male and female chorus respectively, and started some song and dance ensemble.

  Fitted to each other in one way, certainly. In others, he was not so sure. He fancied the man was more likely to get his fun out of warm and grubby little typists. And the woman? Well, as far as she looked human at all, he associated her with something Middle-Eastern.

  He pictured her in bed with a certain Egyptian of his acquaintance, shuddered, and finished his beer.

  Quite suddenly he felt that he had had enough. The whole place, its atmosphere, its decoration scheme, its sleek waiters and impossible clientele, took him by the throat. He seized his hat, disregarded the insinuating palm of the cloakroom attendant (whose worried expression was probably due to the fact that he was having difficulty with his surtax returns) and pushed out into the night.

  Descending Hay Hill an American soldier stopped him.

  “Mister, what time do you make it?”

  “Ten past nine,” said McCann. Unlike some of his countrymen, he liked American soldiers. He had seen them fight.

  “Ten after nine, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You wouldn’t, perhaps, be a minute or two fast?”

  McCann considered the matter.

  “Well, yes, I might be,” he admitted.

  The American produced two heavy, expensive-looking platinum timepieces and scrutinised them carefully.

  “Coming up for nine minutes past nine right now,” he said. “Five—four—three—two—one—now.”

  “Thank you so much. Good night.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” said the American sombrely, and rolled on his way.

  Major McCann pushed on in the general direction of Shepherd’s Market.

  He wanted to find a pub as different as possible from the hotel he had just left. From his pre-war recollections, this was a promising area to start in.

  A name came into his head. “The Pink Elephant.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said a small man, who seemed to have materialised from the pavement.

  “I’m very sorry—I was talking to myself.”

  “Did I hear you mention ‘The Pink Elephant’?”

  “That’s right – a public house: somewhere in these parts, unless it’s been blitzed.”

  “It hasn’t been blitzed,” said the small man. “It’s been closed.”

  “Closed? Who by?”

  “The police.”

  “Oh—ah—yes. I see.” Thinking it over he was not really surprised. “Perhaps,” he went on, “you could tell me the name of some other place.”

  “Depends what you want,” said the small man.

  “Beer—and peace and quiet.”

  “Try the Leopard. First right, down the steps, right again, and on your right.”

  “Right,” said the Major. “I mean, thank you very much. I will.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said the small man, and dematerialised.

  As Major McCann, following these directions, approached his objective, so a sense of familiarity grew. And when he got there he recognised it quite easily, although it was (good God!) over ten years since he had been there. The faded signboard was the same, and he remembered the three awkward steps up to the saloon bar with the metal boot scraper at the bottom. He recollected vividly falling down the one on to the other, one frosty moonless night.

  He wondered if Pop still owned the place.

  Pop Carter had been quite a celebrity in those far-off pre-war days. A man of middle height, thick build and indeterminate class. All things to all men. Hear him talking to the famous authors who came almost nightly to the public bar and you suspected him of having a broad and Catholic imagination – listen to him swapping stories with the commercials and you were sure of it. He had acted as his own chucker-out and had been an expert practitioner with the blackthorn truncheon which hung under the serving ledge. Had he not laid out with it “Rufus” Gavigan the very night that enterprising gentleman had finished attending to the London office of the Société Anonyme, and had come to celebrate his million franc haul on Pop’s Four Star, with the result that whilst policemen beat through the streets and restaurants, bars and brothels of the West End, Rufus lay happily unconscious in the casualty ward of the Middlesex Hospital.

  “Where’s Mr. Carter?” he asked the woman behind the bar.

  “He’s dead,” said the woman. “Been dead for five years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I knew him well in the old days. Perhaps you remember him yourself.”

  “I ought to,” said the woman. “He was my father.” She said it, however, without malice.

  The Major really looked at her for the first time. He remembered, now, that Pop had possessed a wife, who sometimes “obliged” in the saloon bar, and a family who had never made a public appearance at all. He had heard that there was a daughter who had gone to a school “above her station”. This was probably the one. She seemed pleasant and capable.

  “Have something yourself,” he suggested.

  She gave him a quick look and paid him the compliment of accepting a gin and lime.

  “I remember your father,” he said, “a very remarkable man. Quite outstanding in his own line.”

  “He was a dear,” said Miss Carter, with unexpected warmth. “You heard what happened to him?”

  “No—I’ve been out of touch lately.”

  “He and Mother together—it happened about the end of the first Blitz. Were you in England then?”

  “Yes,” said the Major, “but not in London, thank heaven.”

  “I never knew two people who took less notice of things like that. You know—bombs and noises. I used to be scared stiff. And when a big one came especially near I’d start downstairs for the shelter. Then I’d stop for a minute and listen at their door. And I’d hear them snoring. So I’d hop back into bed. Pride’s a funny thing.”

  “So’s breeding,” thought the Major. “It sticks out a mile, wherever you find it.”

  He was often surprised at the frequency with which perfect strangers confided their life histories to him. Only that morning a man from whom he had stopped to buy a newspaper at the corner of Panton Street had spent a quarter of an hour taking him through the details of a rather optimistic pension claim.

  Miss Carter returned from serving a customer with whisky (of which she seemed to have an almost pre-war stock) and picked up her gin and lime and the thread of her story.

  “After all,” she said, “the house never lost so much as a pane of glass. Mother and Father were killed walking down Regent Street. It was the last bomb of the last bad raid we had in the West End.”

  She stared dreamily into the cloudy centre of her glass and the Major wondered what she was seeing in it. Metal, flame, smoke, destruction, mutilation. Cordite blackened clothes. Grey skin and the rich plum colour of newly shed blood.

  Or nothing at all.

  “Don’t talk about it if it worries you,” he said.

  “It used to worry me,” said Miss Carter. “Oh dear, how it used to worry me. But hard work’s a good cure for worry. The old man owned this place – freehold, goodwill and all. It’s not a brewer’s house, you know. And not a penny out on mortgage. I’ve been running it ever since. Coming, sir— same again ?”

  It couldn’t be an easy place to run. The Leopard was not only a pub, it was a “Residential” as well. That is to say, it had half a dozen rooms available for bed and breakfast. If Pop Carter had liked you, you might stay there any time from six days to six months, a pleasant, rather hand-to-mouth existence which entailed taking your midday meal out and sharing the evening meal with the family. If Pop Carter had disliked you, your stay
would have been more in the neighbourhood of six minutes, or even six seconds.

  “I’ve got plenty of rooms,” he once said to a stout business man who appeared to be travelling with his secretary (possibly pressure of work dictated his idea that they should share the same bedroom) “but you’re not having one. And you can sue me for refusing to take you in. And if you do I shall charge you with stealing one of my silver tankards from the private bar. I lost three last week.”

  Not that there had been much logic in the old man’s choices. It was just a question of like and dislike. He remembered “Glasgow”. She had been one of his oldest tenants. What had happened to her, he wondered.

  Miss Carter anticipated the question by remarking as she returned: “If you knew Pop well, you probably met Miss Macduff.”

  “I certainly did,” said the Major.

  “She’s still with us – the last of the old faithfuls. Perhaps you’d like to run up and have a word with her. She moved up to Number Ten during the Blitz. Said the nearer she got to heaven the better. Do run up. She’d love to see you.”

  The Major climbed the stairs and knocked at No. 10.

  “Come away in,” said the well-remembered voice.

  Glasgow was sitting on the edge of her bed, comfortably if informally dressed in a polo-necked primrose sweater and a kimono; and, as the Major became increasingly aware, very little else. She raised at him the bland appraising look which had first set his heart beating to double time ten years and more since.

  “Why, Angus – you’re a sight for sore eyes. Sit down and talk to an old woman.”

  She cleared a space for him on the bed by sweeping a few of the things that were there already off on to the floor.

  “London’s a cold sad place, these days. It’s only old friends that keep me from drink and worse.”

  “What’s worse than drink, Glasgow?” he said, affectionately picking up her hand.

  “Come away, come away,” said Miss Macduff sternly, giving him, nevertheless, an affectionate squeeze. “No tricks, now, or I’ll be obliged to scream.”