The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  “Thief?” I yelled (having not heard anything he’d said since he’d said that). “My Uncle’s not a thief. How dare you call my uncle a thief?!”

  “Och!” He shrugged his shoulders in irritation. “That’s by the by; water under the bridge. I expect his old skills come in very useful in his new profession. What I meant to say, Rosa, was . .”

  “I don’t care what you meant to say!” I got the pedals moving and pushed off, slowly, wobbling along the promenade and towards the road. “Leave me alone, you horrible old man!”

  The fire of righteous indignation propelled me up the steep, cork-screwing road from the bay, but, by the time I’d reached St Margaret at Cliffe, I was starting to wish I hadn’t said that and the feeling grew with each turn of the pedals, until it had become a rock that weighed me down all the way through the village and up to the Dover Road and beyond. How could I have said such a thing? I’d have been nothing but a few scraps of white bone buried in the bed of the North Sea, if not for the Major. How I hated myself. I gave up pedalling by Oxneybottom Wood and sat down under a tree to have my picnic. I stuffed myself with chocolate buns and a thermos flask full of cocoa, which I suppose I should say turned to ashes in my mouth (they didn’t, they tasted divine), but I still didn’t feel much better. I felt so down I wanted to run through the trees and then keep going, on and on over the ploughed fields and through the villages. On and on and on. (When people say, ‘I didn’t know where to put myself’, they speak metaphorically, of course. Not me.) I tipped the thermos upside down to drain the last drops of cocoa into my mouth and sighed.

  My picnic had made me feel drowsy and I lay down with my face up-turned to the afternoon sun, my thoughts skittering off in a million directions. Assuming she was there, what could I possibly say to Mrs Dilys Arkonnen, who was (presumably) Reg’s wife and Magnus’ aunt? And what if Uncle Reg were at home, too? There was a thought! Perhaps I’d knock on the door and find the whole family enjoying a leisurely weekend lunch together, Acker Bilk playing on the gramophone in the background and Magnus annoying Aunt Dilys by smoking his roll-ups at table. Crumbs. I rolled onto my side and fell asleep.

  Heaven knows how long I slept, but I woke up stiff as a board all along my right side, with a twig stuck to my cheek. I was cold, too and more than a bit disorientated until I caught sight of my rusty bike and empty thermos and remembered my mission. The whole thing suddenly seemed pretty daft and I nearly turned back towards home, but for the little niggle of pride; I needed to achieve something - anything, just to say I’d been to the bungalow would do - before I apologised to Major Dyminge. So I limped over to my bike, stuffed the thermos back in my rucksack and continued my journey to ‘Sea-Surf’ or ‘Sea-Turtle’, or whatever the Arkonnen’s holiday bungalow on the Ringwould road turned out to be called.

  At some point in my sleep I’d arrived at the sensible decision not to knock on the front door (in case Uncle Reg was around) but to scout about and see what I could see. What I was hoping to find was anybody’s guess - including my own - but, as I’ve already explained, I possess good noticing skills. So that was what I was going to do; be as low-key as possible and notice.

  Bungalows had been cropping up all over the area, but few of them were as grand and white and hot off the assembly line as ‘Seaspray’ proved to be. I sailed right past it to begin with because I thought it was just too big to qualify as a bungalow and was more of a mansion. However, when none of the other bungalows proved to be called ‘Sea-Anything at all’ and I’d ridden through Ringwould as far as the lane to Kingsdown, I turned right round and followed a tractor back along the road. This time I noticed the sign by the gate, so I cycled a bit further along, propped the bike up against a pillar box and ran over to the front wall, ducking down low in case anybody happened to be looking out of the net curtains. Nobody was about in the road, thankfully, so I bobbed up and down behind the wall, trying to take in as much as I could.

  The place had a dead feel to it, but then houses with windows swathed in net often do. There were white pillars that made me think of the Deep South mansions in Gone With the Wind[34] and rose bushes and a lot of lawn that had grown taller than I expected lawns belonging to people with portico-ed mansions to have. I thought of Mrs Dyminge’s grass with its ‘aspirations’; the growing season had evidently begun and yet nobody had cut this grass since the end of the previous year. It seemed like a clue to me. So, screwing up courage, I lifted the latch on the front gate and ran up the concrete path - scored with a stick as it set, so as to look like flagstones – and hid behind one of the pillars by the front door. Crisp, brown leaves were lodged in the corners of the doorstep where the wind had sent them. I picked one up and it crumbled between my fingers. Then I crouched down and looked through the letter-box. A whole pile of letters had fallen onto the mat and been left to accumulate. That decided it; I was confident that nobody was at home.

  The view through the letter-box yielded no more clues, because an inner door of thick, patterned glass was firmly shut, so I stood up and ran around the front of the house to take a look at the side. No lavatory window had been left, carelessly, open and there was no side entrance to the house but, on the plus side, there was no fence barring the way to the back, so I scuttled all the way around, expecting to find an expanse of garden; a rockery like a mini-Switzerland and a bit of a shed, at the very least. But I didn’t find a bit of a shed, I found a lot of a shed.

  All of the space behind the house, bar a couple of yards’ width of more scored concrete abutting the back door, was taken up by a low shed that was considerably bigger than most people’s houses. A rectangular, white building with four windows evenly spaced along the front and all barred. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This seemed over the top for a holiday home in Ringwould.

  A thumping great padlock hung from the shed door and my excitement mounted still further. There was definitely something worth hiding inside. Could it be the second secret? How maddening that I couldn’t get to it! I yanked the padlock this way and that, as if it might have been left not fully clicked by mistake, which, of course, it hadn’t been. Then I cupped my hands around the sides of my eyes and tried peering between the window bars, but all was black and indistinguishable. Straightening up, I noticed that it was beginning to grow dark around me and, while the passage between the two white buildings must have been starved of light at the best of times, it was positively gloomy now that the clouds above were thickening into a solid wodge of charcoal grey, rimmed with the last vestiges of daylight. If twilight were on its way, I must have been asleep for much, much longer than I’d imagined.

  It was frustrating, but I’d noticed as much as I was going to notice at ‘Seaspray’. I sighed out loud and turned from the window but, even as I turned, a faint glow from inside the shed imprinted itself on my retina. I jumped and, instinctively, glanced behind me to find the light that had cast its reflection onto the shed window. But there was no light. I peered inside the shed once more, my heart now thumping like crazy. There was no doubt about it, something in there had begun to glow, modestly at first and then, as if gathering the last daylight to itself, ever bolder. Deep in the recesses of my odd brain, there came a click. Twilight, black light, ultraviolet light; three names for similar phenomena. Arko’s yellow glass was inside the shed and it was starting to fluoresce under the ultraviolet rays inherent in twilight. I was transfixed as the glow burned pale yellow, then gold, then a sharp acid-green, tossing light at the corners of the shed, at bulky sacks and iron rods stacked against the wall. At a row of coat hooks hammered high up, where the figure of a man swung by his neck from a rope. A gust of wind howled down the gloomy corridor and swept under the shed door, pawing at the suspended figure. He swung round to look at me. It was Mr B Dexter and he’d never see Alaska again.

  14. The Rare Bird

  Immediately after I’d had words with Rosa, I jumped in the new car, drove over to HQ and convinced the night watchman to let me in. It was around ten at
night and the general hubbub had died down and only a few tenacious souls were hunched over their desks in shirtsleeves, determined to burn the midnight oil. Slipping past the stairs to the basement, I detected the rumble of far-flung voices from down below. Jay Tamang was probably at home, but it wasn’t Tamang that I’d come to find. I wanted to get a look at the files - Arko Arkonnen’s files - because somebody had done such a thorough job of pulling the wool over our eyes that it looked like we were all sporting bloody balaclavas.

  The whole thing took a bit of effort, because my section’s remarkably efficient secretary had set up labyrinthine filing systems of her own devising. I’d never have cracked them but for the fact that I’d hung about behind her door one day, trying to get my lighter to work, and chanced to see what she was up to. She’d had a type of grid worked out on a piece of paper and was checking a pile of dockets against it before she filed them away. The grid interested me, so I hung about a bit more and saw her hide it in the back of her desk calendar (one of those office jobs with a page for every day that one rips off when today becomes yesterday). However, even with her grid to hand, it was hard work finding Arko’s file. I couldn’t think why she hadn’t been satisfied with locking her filing cabinets like all the other girls; picking locks was childsplay by comparison. I reflected upon the interesting nature of unnecessarily devious minds, before I switched on a desk lamp, hung my jacket on the back of the chair and got down to work.

  ——

  Nobody catches on! He’s too good, that’s the trouble; it makes my job a bit dull when nobody at all catches on and I’ve nothing to report. So Arko was more than welcome.

  ——

  Somebody had taken considerable pains to compose the file on Ragnvald ‘Arko’ Arkonnen.

  He was born in 1904 in Helsinki into a poor, Finnish-speaking family in the period, before the Revolution, when Finland had been subject to what was termed the ‘Russification’. His father, Ove Arkonnen, was on record as a supporter of the Socialist-Communist Reds during the brief Finnish Civil War of 1917. When Imperial Germany sided with the Whites, however, Arkonnen senior had been thrown into a prison camp, where he subsequently perished of pneumonia, leaving his young family destitute. Arko, himself, first came to the notice of the authorities at an early age, when he stole some money from a Lutheran church, for which he was given a spell in prison. What followed was a fairly seamless descent into the criminal underworld that could have served as a textbook for every third-rate hood with ambition, it was so detailed. It rather reminded me of Simenon[35] and the type of character that Inspector Maigret routinely pitted his wits against on the streets of Paris.

  ——

  Arko Arkonnen. You bad, bad boy.

  ——

  To sum up, there’d been another prison sentence - for smuggling alcohol during Finland’s prohibition - and reports of a wide variety of misdemeanours during that time, with the emphasis on extortion and assault. There were hints, too, of several murders in his immediate sphere, where the culprit was never brought to justice for lack of crucial evidence. However, the second world war years drew a blank; from which one could only infer that Arko had not been fighting alongside the brave Finns, but had preferred to align himself with parties unknown. His subsequent involvement in a string of different industries - before he bought into Vas-Glas - and the clear indications that he’d benefited from ‘trade privileges’ with the Soviets, gave some idea of just who he might have been fighting with during the war. In short, Arko Arkonnen was a nasty species of jumped-up thug, and an out and out Red, to boot.

  I had to admit that nothing in Arko’s file smelt, specifically, of rodent; it was all extraordinarily well done. Perhaps too well done. Was that it? I thought of my niece and her propensity for giving too much detail.

  I leaned back in the chair and happened to clock the filing cabinet against the wall, where I’d left it open in my hunt for Arko’s file, and it was then that I had what’s known as a flashback.

  “What an unnecessarily devious mind my secretary must have,” I’d thought.

  I sat bolt upright. Well . . could it be her? She was perfectly placed, after all. In-situ. What were the odds? After all, HQ was - by definition - choc-full of characters with unnecessarily devious minds (like my own, if I were being honest). Yet I had an instinct about it; it was a foolish spy who got so bogged down in fact he forgot to use his instinct. I just had the strongest of hunches that my secretary - Miss Whatshername - had written Arko’s file. It was a gamble, but . . odds on, I’d found our mole.

  I resolved to drop into Personnel in the morning - Saturday be damned - and do a bit of background research on our Miss Whatshername, before I set a shadow on her when she left work on Monday. We had some excellent shadows and it was unlikely that their paths would ever have crossed . . although, if she were as devious as I thought, I’d better shake up a good shadow who’d been out of the building for a spell.

  I put my jacket back on, thinking about Miss Whatshername. She was a spinster of a certain age; just a touch desiccated, was the first impression. A slim woman, neatly turned out and of average height. Pale pink skirt-suit affairs. Good legs. Mousy hair set with a wave, quiet demeanour, nothing remotely reprehensible about her. I seemed to think her voice was on the high side, although not shrill, and that she wore reading glasses; the variety that had a touch of sparkle and a definite point to the upper, outer edge of the frames. The glasses hinted at a frivolity that was otherwise entirely absent. However, I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what her name was.

  I did a swift search of her desk, which yielded little, if not nothing. Of course, she was so delightfully devious that there wasn’t a clue to be found. The kind of woman who can refrain from cosying up her office with anything whatsoever - no calendar with pictures of cats, no snapshots of somebody’s baby, no spare lipstick nor bottle of scent in the bottom drawer of the desk - is rare, in my experience. Miss Whatshername was either watching her back, preparing to scarper, or a very rare bird, indeed.

  I drove back to Tite Street wondering whether the parsimonious Hutch would run to shadows for Miss W, the Black Box nightclub and the journalist’s house in Fulham. He might take some convincing, but there should be no skimping – you couldn’t defend Britain and what was left of her Empire on tuppence halfpenny and that was all there was to it. Then there was Rosa. Oughtn’t Rosa to have protection of some kind? She’d sworn blind that she hadn’t been followed down to Kent, but what did she know? The girl was an amateur.

  I parked the car and sat, running over it all, at the wheel. What I really ought to do, was to get one of the family to keep an eye on Rosa and make sure she didn’t go trolling into Dover as if she were Bulldog Drummond[36]. But who? My wife’s older sister, Millicent, would have been the ideal candidate because, on top of being Rosa’s mother, she was an admirably tough cookie and the real force to be reckoned with in that family. However, she’d made it pretty clear that I was persona non grata in those quarters and I wasn’t sure that I felt like braving her quite so soon after our phone conversation. I locked the car, thoughtfully.

  Kathleen had gone to bed when I got in, leaving a note propped up against the empty bottle of Gordon’s to the effect that she’d an early call for Elstree and would be in the spare bedroom, neither of which was unusual. After an initial, rather nice, period of frankness (brushes with death can have that effect, I’ve found), we’d drifted back into politeness in the weeks since our journey down the slide and, if she wasn’t busy filming, she was on the telephone to her agent, or her sister. She also spent long hours chewing the cud with my father and his friend, Air Chief Marshal Sir Gabriel Adair, at their home in Norfolk. God only knew what they found to say; I certainly didn’t because my father and I’d never seen eye to eye (and the less I knew about the Norfolk set-up, the better). In the early days, Kathleen had tried to interest me in their affairs in an all too transparent plot to effect a touching family reunion - Kathleen’s plots were generally
signalled with flags and multiple costume changes - but I’d resisted and she’d given me up for a bad job.

  I collapsed into an armchair and pulled the boomerang-shaped coffee table closer with one foot, reaching for the green, glass ashtray; a great chunk of trapped air bubbles. Too much was churning about in my mind to make sleep a practical proposition, so I smoked a couple of cigarettes and stared at the wall of curtain - a blue and fawn material spattered with a pattern that might have been snowflakes, or diagrams of atomic matter - before I got up to switch the television set on. It was just going off air and I turned it off again before the National Anthem got into its stride. There was nothing for it but to make tracks, and that’s what I was doing when the telephone rang.

  “FLAxman 4390.”

  “Ah. Ah. So sorry to disturb you at this late hour, Tristram . .”

  Talk of the devil, it was my father.

  “Is Kathleen still . . I mean to say, is Kathleen there? Any chance of a quick word with Kathleen? In other words.”

  Either he’d been on the juice, or senility was making inroads.

  “She’s asleep, Father. Can’t it wait?”

  “Um. The thing is, Tristram. She rang for a brief confab, oh . . twenty minutes ago, max, and I was supposed to ring her back, but I got caught up in one thing and another and . .”

  “Well she’ll be fast asleep by now and she’s filming in the morning.”

  “Is she? She didn’t mention that. I don’t suppose you’d just pop your head around the door and . .”