‘Thanks Gus,’ I said quietly.
‘That’s all right,’ he said again, ‘anytime. Anyway, I like putting toast in the toaster.’
‘No, I mean …’ He held out his hand, and I clasped it warmly with my good hand. There’s no one like Gus.
‘It wasn’t me, you know. It was all Arabella’s doing.’
‘It was both of you,’ I responded. ‘Tell me, where the blazes did you get that grenade you told me about?’
‘Same fellow who sold me the Colt. You know, the soldier I mentioned. Gave me two, he did.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘I wanted them in case Jerry invaded, and the soldiers buggered off. Gave me a sort of feeling of confidence I’d be safe then. With the gun and the grenades, I mean.’
Made sense, I supposed, in those difficult days of World War II.
‘You should have handed them in years ago, Gus. They’re so old, they’re probably unstable now.’
He shrugged his shoulders and winced with the pain.
‘Anyway, Gus,’ I continued, ‘where have you been keeping them all this time? Surely not in the house?’
His eyes brightened. ‘Nope,’ he announced proudly. ‘I’m not as daft as I look, you know.’
The toast popped up, and he went over and put it in the toast rack.
‘Thank heavens for that,’ I said. ‘But where did you store them?’
‘In the shed.’ He sat down again.
‘Which shed?’ I asked anxiously.
‘The big one.’
I got up, and almost killed him on the spot.
‘You silly sod; that’s where I keep my Daimler. It could have been blown to pieces any second of any hour of any day of the two and a half years it’s been there.’ Gus didn’t look in the least perturbed.
‘Didn’t though, did it?’ he said smugly. ‘It was just my boat that blew up. And that was no grenade.’
I took his point, and changed the subject. I’m not very bright.
‘We must burn the diaries double quick after breakfast,’ I said. He nodded, and offered his jersey up to my nose. I didn’t twig what he was up to until that unmistakable sweet smell of bonfire smoke got through to me.
‘Done mine hours ago,’ he said. ‘What about yours?’ I went up to the loo and fetched it. ‘I’ll take it away and burn it for you. You’ve got enough clearing up here to do.’ And he was right.
I dressed, having breakfasted in bed with Arabella, and had done a great deal of cleaning up before we heard Trevor Blake’s white Ford pull up outside. I let him in, thankful that Gus had already left with the 1944 diary.
I felt like a drink all of a sudden, a stiff one, I mean. And to my surprise, the Inspector joined me. We sipped our Scotches in silence for a minute or two before either of us spoke.
‘He killed his wife, didn’t he?’ he said at last.
‘Yes, I read the 1981 diary. He loved her very much.’
He looked across at me. I didn’t move a muscle. ‘I burnt all the diaries before you came,’ I lied.
‘Still,’ he resumed, ‘so long as you and I know. That’s probably sufficient, don’t you think?’
He raised his glass, but I didn’t follow suit.
‘Tell me, Peter — may I call you Peter? — tell me, why did he kill her? Because she had run away with another man?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied quietly. ‘It was because she had discovered something about his youth, in one of his earliest diaries — 1944.’
‘1944,’ he echoed, reflectively. ‘And you’ve read that diary too?’
‘No, I haven’t. The diary was missing when I found them. So we’ll probably never know his motives,’ I lied again. I just couldn’t tell him. The passions of childhood, however misguided, seemed to me intensely private.
‘They were in his car, weren’t they?’
I looked across at him. ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t, until this morning, when I examined his Silver Cloud. The bootlid had been forced. He would not have done that himself, now would he?’
There was no answer to that. I got up from my chair and began pacing round the room. ‘Look, Inspector …’
He interrupted me. ‘If I’m going to call you Peter, you ought to begin calling me Trevor, you know.’
I ignored him and resumed. ‘Look, Inspector, I’m sick, sick, sick of this whole affair. You just got me to do your dirty work for you. I know you never came out and actually asked me, but that’s what you did, nevertheless. I carried out all those little investigations and probings that you and your boys are not legitimately allowed to do, didn’t I? You not only used my mini computer, as you called it, to supplement your big ones down at headquarters, but you damn near got me killed in the process. And it’s ended up with me shouldering all the guilt for Treasure’s suicide, and not you. It may be all very clever on your part, Inspector, but it doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing. And I’m never doing it again — not for you, not for the Chief Commissioner of Scotland Yard, not for God himself. In future, you can get your own hands dirty, or let the bloody criminals …’
‘Let the bloody criminals do what, Peter?’ he asked me quietly, as I ran out of steam. He got up and came over to me by the window.
‘Look outside, Peter. Beautiful, isn’t it? England at her best. A sleeping seaside village, little old ladies going about their shopping, children with shrimping nets trekking off down to the rock pools, nothing but the rustle of the young green leaves, the call of a gull, and an occasional car to break the peace.’
He looked around the obviously still disarranged room. ‘No sound of houses being broken into.’ I didn’t rise to the remark. Gates had only been doing what Treasure had asked him. And now, with Treasure’s demise, he had no job.
‘Forget the violins,’ I said quietly. ‘What you’re saying, is that you can’t keep it that way just with a truncheon, a pointed blue helmet, a few “Hello, hello, hellos”, and a million miles of bumf diarrhoeaing out of the bowels of a computer.’
He didn’t need to answer, and he didn’t. It was at that moment, rather than before, that my association with Inspector Trevor Blake really started, but I never came to call him Trevor. I’m afraid I joined the criminal fraternity in dubbing him ‘Sexton’.
*
It took many more weeks for Arabella and me really to start living, and loving, normally again. By that time, Pilot Officer Redfern had received his long-overdue right of a dignified Christian burial in hallowed ground, with a band from the RAF accompanying the hymns. And we had begun a fund raising scheme for a Warmwell Battle of Britain museum. But Arabella still wouldn’t move in with me completely, keeping her things at her cousin’s nursery at Owermoigne. ‘One day, maybe,’ was all I got and, in the end, all I pressed for.
Neither of us mentioned or questioned how long our relationship might last — we just lived every second of the times we were together to the full. And that bit was, and is, magnificent. And I like to think it’s a little bit of therapy from yours truly that has got Arabella, at last, talking about becoming a reporter again — maybe on our own local paper. That might, actually, make all the difference. And not just to whether she moves into the Toy Emporium or goes on living at Owermoigne. (Although that’s highest on my love agenda.) But I must give her time; everybody needs time. None of us ever gets allotted enough of it, to know each other really well. That’s half the trouble. Come to think — could be the whole, couldn’t it?
Still, we’ve got a whole three weeks of each other — starting tomorrow. We’re off on a holiday to the south of France. You see, I at last replied to Monsieur Vincent’s letter that asked about the toys. I said they were fine, and much admired by Mr Chalmers and mentioned a nice note of thanks he’d written about them. Then added how I loved my hour or so in his charming house in St Paul de Vence. He put me to shame and replied quickly: how would I like to spend a few weeks down here over the summer and keep an old man company? He gave
me his phone number, so I rang and queried whether he minded an extra guest in female form.
‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it would make it like a family again.’
We so hoped it would.
So there we are. Almost full circle. But this time, we’re going in her car, I’ve booked through a different travel agent, we’re on a hovercraft not a ferry and we aren’t going autoroute. (Sorry, Quinky, I’m otherwise engaged.) We’re taking our time, getting to know a bit more of France, the old roads, the by-ways, the local bistros, a little old country hotel or two, but I guess, most of all — discovering each other.
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