Tinplate Read online

  Gus sat down again, and as always, a delicate cloud of dust arose from the chair. His lungs must now have more uncut moquette in them than is left on the furniture.

  ‘And, by the way,’ I added, ‘the Inspector reminded me that no one, as yet, can be certain of the cause of death. It could be natural causes; badgers could have disturbed the bones and carried off part of the skull; Santa Claus eats four billion mince pies, and downs as many glasses of sherry every Christmas night between twelve and two.’

  I think he was getting my point.

  ‘Have to keep the two things separate in your mind, you know,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What two things?’

  ‘Your stolen toys and that dead woman. One is your problem, the other isn’t. Well, that is, unless you’re daft enough to get involved.’

  I knew what he meant. I had to keep my head clear. I got up abruptly, startling Bing off my lap. I bent to stroke him reassuringly, but he was already making for the door.

  ‘Thanks Gus. I’ve got one or two things to do now. I’d better get back and do them.’

  He rose and came with me to the little front path.

  ‘Sure I can’t help?’

  ‘Not this second, Gus, not this second. But thanks.’

  Bing and I strode back up to my place. But I had a feeling Gus would be needed pretty soon. I wondered what fishermen knew about skeleton keys.

  *

  The next hour or so, I spent a fortune on the phone. The cheapest call was to my friend on the Western Gazette. In a quarter of an hour, he found the information I wanted on the departed Mrs Veronica Charlotte Treasure. Apparently, from the newspaper reports of the time, she left for Lausanne on a Geneva flight on 24 March 1981. Randolph Treasure was reported as saying, ‘My wife was not one of the most faithful of wives, and I imagine she has gone off to live with one of her lovers. I know she had many Swiss friends. That’s all I wish to say. It’s all been very distressing’ etc., etc.

  A column in the next week’s edition reported that Mrs Treasure had actually been seen to board a British Airways flight to Geneva on the day in question, that she had luggage with her and had taken an internal flight to Lausanne. So it looked as if she had escaped from old Treasure’s hairy hands, after all, and found love (or, more probably, something a little more basic) in the cleanest, tidiest little country in Europe. God bless her and every cuckoo clock she winds up, but it wasn’t much help to me.

  So I rang a few of the more sprauncy hotels in Lausanne, just in case, saying I was ringing from Scotland Yard. Futile hope, I knew, but the Telecom bill would not be along for two months or so, by which time I would probably be in debtors’ prison anyway. And, naive idiot that I was, I struck lucky at the seventh call. ‘Yes,’ said the man at the front desk of the Hotel Magnifique, in fairly good English, ‘one moment, please … we did ’ave a Mrs Treasure ’ere the night of 24 March. I ’ave ’er signature in front of my ’and … No, I do not remember ’er myself. We ’ave so many guests from England … Yes, it looks as if she checked out the next day … Of course, the bill was paid. Really, Inspector, I must remind you, some things must remain confidential in our business …’

  So that was that. Dear Mrs Treasure had gone to Lausanne, but where she was now was anybody’s guess. The one thing one could be sure of was that a woman like that, once gone, would never return. It’s new pages they always want to turn, not ones they have already well thumbed.

  1 got a call then — from a real Inspector. Trevor Blake. He just thought that I would like to know that they had discovered what seemed like the remains of Pilot Officer Redfern, and quite a collection of remnants of clothing, parachute and so on. He thought I would be pleased for old Mrs Redfern — and for our proposed museum. I said I was, very, and thanked him for letting me know. And that was that.

  I was sitting in the shop, having just sold a Japanese TN brand tinplate jeep with an electric motor that actuated the soldier passenger to answer the vehicle’s telephone (really very cute), and was thinking about all those people I would like to see when, lo and behold, Arabella came back into my life. And I thought, screw it, even a bankrupt has got to take some time off. So I let her in, and turned my ‘Open’ sign to ‘Closed’. A moment later I let her out again, because she had invited me out to tea, and a real cream tea at that.

  We went in her car, and she drove like the wind, but well. And in no time at all we were in the uniquely attractive village of Corfe, nestling below the dramatic shadow of its guardian castle, a gaunt and craggy ruin atop its grassy hill.

  ‘You’re going to take me up to the top to earn your clotted cream and scones, Mr Marklin, sir.’ She pointed at the castle. ‘I’ve never been right up. Randolph has always refused to come with me. He says I’m a born tourist at heart. Should wear Bermuda shorts and all that.’

  I said she should. She’d look nice in them. She gave me a glance, then dragged me by the hand up to the castle gates, where the ticket collector was more interested in the crazy streaks in her hair than the colour of our money. And so we began the long climb up and I started to feel better. Even the clouds began peeling away to leave the heavens blue and clear, and seemingly infinite from our higher and higher view-point.

  ‘Does Treasure know you’re with me?’ I asked, rather out of breath from the slope.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, without glancing my way. I stopped her and made her look at me.

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I said I was going to ask if you would take me to see the castle, as he wouldn’t. Nothing more dramatic.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Shrugged his shoulders, and didn’t say anything.’

  ‘So you went, like that.’

  ‘I came, like that.’ She leaned across and kissed me. ‘I came to be with you, and not to talk about Randolph.’ And we resumed walking.

  When we got to the massive ruins at the top — the result of Cromwell getting rather annoyed with the Royalists — I suddenly wished I was a real fully blown tourist, complete with clicking Cannon slung from my neck. I wanted a picture of her just the way she was — filmy polka-dot dress, bare legs, flat sandals, wind in her hair and freedom in her soul. And I could almost see her female hormones making sure I got the message.

  I made her stand by a fractured wall, an archer’s slit window just above her head, on the right. And I made as if I was Lord Snowdon, winding and snapping. She laughed and spread herself against the wall like an Egyptian in a frieze from an ancient Pharaoh’s tomb. In a moment I joined her and pressed her against the unyielding stones, body to body. We kissed until a party of Germans wanted to get by. They’ve never had much sense of timing.

  We climbed higher up where the hill became quite precipitous to our left and the ruins were more ruined. A kestrel soared up into the air above us. The path was very narrow now, and I had to go ahead. Arabella said she had got a stone in her sandal, and I heard her footsteps behind me cease. I walked on a little way, to wait for her by another archer’s window. I stopped and looked out through the slit at the grey stone and slate village far below. It was then I heard a scream, immediately followed by a stunning pain in my right shoulder, as I could not stop myself collapsing to the ground. I writhed in agony, and began falling down the sharply inclined bank on the other side. I tried to claw at the tufts of grass to stop my descent, but in the end, a bush beat me to it and I thwacked into its branches. I waited to catch my breath, then tried to sit up but my right shoulder was shouting too much with the pain. I leaned on my left arm and looked around. It was then I saw Arabella clambering down towards me. If she was a welcome sight before, she was a hundred times more so now.

  ‘Peter, are you all right?’ she asked frantically, kneeling down beside me and giving me her hand. I took it gratefully with my left.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’m back on my feet. Give me a pull up, but gently. My right shoulder’s on fire.’

  She did so and I managed to get more or less upright
, with my left hand supporting a little of the weight on the sloping grass above me.

  ‘Something hit my shoulder. What was it? Did you see?’

  ‘I think it was one of the stones above you. I looked up from doing my shoe and saw something coming down. The next moment you were on the ground and rolling over.’

  ‘Was it you who screamed?’ Arabella helped me get up the bank, shaky step by shaky step.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, almost in a whisper.

  When we got to the top, we found we had quite an audience. The Germans were there, of course, a couple of Japanese, two pushchairs and assorted parents, grannies and lovers, and a very butch lady with a Ronald Colman moustache.

  We anticipated them by saying we were fine, and rather slowly and painfully made our way back down the hill to the gates at the bottom, Arabella’s arm firmly round my waist. The ticket collector’s hairdresser’s eye appraised her once more, as we passed through.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’ Arabella asked anxiously. I felt my shoulder saying ‘Yes’ rather loudly, but my romantic side won.

  ‘Didn’t you say something about a cream tea, my ravishing rescuer?’

  ‘I did, my poor wounded hero.’

  ‘Then let’s get clotted,’ I said.

  *

  Before we actually went in to the Castleside Tea Rooms, Arabella insisted on inspecting my shoulder in the privacy of her own Golf. It proved to be bruised, grazed and swelling by the minute, but everything seemed to function, albeit painfully, so we decided a doctor could wait until we saw what cream, strawberry jam and scones could do. My attempts to kiss her in the car tended to give the lie to any very urgent need for hospitalization, although I did claim it was keeping my mind off the agony.

  The tea rooms weren’t that crowded, for May was early in the season. We sat at an oak table for two, looking out over a back garden that was precociously early with its summer bedding plants, the antirrhinums already being in flower.

  What I took to be the proprietress, a chubby lady right out of Dickens, took our order, and very soon it was laid out in front of us. If you haven’t had such a West Country treat as a cream tea recently, you should mend your ways. It certainly went some way to mending my shoulder.

  ‘Do you think it was the wind?’ Arabella asked out of the blue. I wondered what on earth she was alluding to.

  ‘What was the wind?’ I retorted, reaching for her hand under the table.

  ‘The stone falling on you, you idiot. Do you think it was the wind that toppled it?’

  ‘I have no idea. I didn’t see it coming, or really, where it came from — except above me.’

  It was about at this time, that I first noticed a thick set young man, seated with a rather fly-blown girl at a table at the back of the room. He was obviously a great ‘toucher’, for she was continually trying to move his hand off one part or another of her anatomy in order to be able to eat her scones in peace. Luckily, in his rabbit-like persistence, he didn’t notice us — or, for that matter, anybody but his companion. I say, ‘luckily’, because Arabella recognized him, and did not really want to be seen. He was, as she explained to me in a whisper, one of Randolph Treasure’s farm-workers, Ken Gates. That on its own would not have been a problem. But Ken was the guy Treasure most relied on to do any of his personal errands. His unsubtle, brutish ways made Arabella dislike him, and she didn’t want to have to speak to him, so I moved my chair around so that only my back showed in his direction — a back that was shielding Arabella from him at the same time. We hoped big Kennie had not already seen us — and we ate our last halves of scone in double quick time.

  Paying was a nerve-wracking and frustrating experience. It took about ten minutes to get the bill because the proprietress was obviously head cook and bottle-washer as well as waitress and financial wizard.

  But afterwards I blessed that dear Dickensian lady from the Castleside Te.a Rooms for her over-busy way of life, for I overheard something that fell from Ken Gates’s pendulous lips just as Arabella was, at last, handing her a clutch of pound coins. It was the word ‘ferry’ that did it. Something about a million cream teas could never make him sick, not like that bleeding cross-Channel ferry the other day.

  Somehow, Mr Treasure’s favourite farm-worker didn’t exactly look the very essence of an international gad-about. I wondered if he had an equally attractive spotty male friend and a penchant for plastic cars.

  I didn’t tell Arabella. I had other plans for the evening, if I could lie on my left side.

  Eight

  Arabella left about eleven. She wouldn’t stay the night; I think I knew why. It wasn’t because of Treasure, I was pretty certain. I think it was a demonstration of freedom — her freedom from anybody. At least, that is what I hoped it was, for we had grown very close that evening, and not just physically. We had wanted to talk about ourselves, what we wanted out of life, what we had not done, and why. And what’s more important, we had both wanted to listen. I told her a bit about my undistinguished past, but she seemed rather cagey about hers for some reason. She knew that I wasn’t exactly the type Unity Mitford would have fallen for and I wondered what she saw in me — besides imminent penury and debt, that is. And the only Roll-Royces I possessed were inches long, rather than feet. Maybe I was the other side of Treasure’s coin.

  It was after she had gone and I was left with the night that the fear hit me. A quaking, shaking fear, that I should have felt the instant that bit of castle hit me. I think it’s called delayed shock; whatever it’s called, the name cannot possibly live up to the sensation. My beauty sleep was again asked to wait outside as my mind became a Hitchcockian whirlpool of terrifying images and pretty ghastly guesses. As I have already intimated, I had been by no means sure the rock was an accident. But now I suddenly put a hand to the rock. The hand that pawed the girl that sat in the cafe that lay near the castle that could have killed me. And I could see another hairy hand pulling the strings. And I could hear a sweet voice enticing me to go and visit the ruins before we settled down to tea. I got up out of bed, dripping with sweat and shaking like the proverbial leaf, and with one shoulder throbbing like hell. In the end I went downstairs, checked all the locks on the doors, the latches on the windows, then swept Bing up from his warm basket in my one good arm, and carried the Siamese saviour up to my own worry-blanket of a bed. I had a feeling there were too many reasons now why I shouldn’t wait for the due processes of the law, and Detective Inspector Trevor Blake. Only one of them was Mr Chalmers’ deadline. So sorry, Mr Blake. It was just the way it was, so help me God.

  *

  The next morning, the post brought its usual medley of bills and letters of enquiry about what toys I had for sale (I advertised regularly in the old toy buffs’ bible, the Collectors Gazette), and the gentleman from Fife wrote to say he would take the Minics. I performed my clerical duties for the day, then sat in my shop and tried to make sense of my thoughts. I was not exactly racing ahead with plans of action worthy of James Bond, when the phone unexpectedly came to my aid.

  It was Deborah, and this time, bless her, with some news that wasn’t just about herself. I almost kissed the receiver for she had remembered my little request from her last lachrymose visit.

  ‘Derek says Treasure is going away for three days,’ she announced to my flapping ears.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘From tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s going?’

  ‘Abroad.’

  I liked that. It sounded a nice long way away. Everybody seemed to be going abroad, or were just back, like Gerald Rankin.

  ‘Not Geneva, by any chance? Or South Africa?’

  ‘Derek just said abroad, and I didn’t want to raise any suspicions by pressing it.’ She sounded disappointed because I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down.

  ‘No, Debby, that’s marvellous news. Keep it up, and you’ll be awarded the Lady Sleuth of the Year award,’ I quickly reassured her.

  ‘By who
m?’ she chuckled. ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, me, if I’m still here to award it, that is.’

  ‘You’re not getting up to anything … er … ?’ I knew she didn’t actually want to say the word ‘dangerous’, so I cut in.

  ‘Of course not. Don’t worry. Just a collector of information, that’s me. A kind of poor man’s Michael Caine.’

  ‘Bankrupt, more like,’ she added, and she didn’t quite realize how accurate her remark was.

  I also learned she had managed to get a loan from her boss (I wondered whether it was a loan, or an advance), and that she was now putting her past behind her (what else can you do with it?), and we rang off, the best of mates.

  I sat for a moment after the call, and soon came to the conclusion that the plan forming in my head was easier done on the movies than in real life. I regretted not having joined the SAS straight from kindergarten. However, nil desperandum, I had to find those toys and quickly. The clock was not ticking my way. So I went to see Gus. I had a feeling he would know about those things.

  I was not disappointed. Gus was getting in his two-door terror when I called. But after hearing the purpose of my visit, he got out again, and gave me an instant demonstration of how easy it was to burgle his house with a piece of wire, and my credit card. I won’t go into the exact details here as I like Gus and I don’t want anyone to burgle his house except me. I thanked him profusely and, after a fair amount of trouble, got my credit card back again. He did not need to ask me what I might be doing with my newfound knowledge. He just said, ‘Be careful’, and ‘Do you need me to come along too?’ I said, ‘I will’ and ‘Not this time, thank you.’ I left then, and he nearly knocked me down a minute later as he bounced past in his Popular.

  *

  When I got home, my shoulder was hurting in a big way again, but like a Spartan hero I ignored it, gathered up Bing and went out in the Beetle. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply Spartan heroes had Siamese cats or Volkswagens.) I had decided to try Gus’s card trick on Treasure first, then Rankin. I just had to get somewhere before Chalmers pulled the rug.