Tinplate Read online

  Luckily, my first three axe blows were more or less deft, and part of the door frame fell away from the latch of the massive Tudor lock. Before I pushed open the door, I listened for any reaction to the crack of the three blows. As yet, there seemed to be none, so I went in. And, my God, instantly I was in another world, and I felt almost guilty for breaking into it. The room was a breathtaking reproduction of a child’s room of the thirties. And that child was so obviously a boy, a very, very lucky boy with generous and imaginative parents. I did not have time to dwell on every playtime gem I recognized displayed within those four walls, and carefully placed upon the cubist style Art Deco carpet, for, beyond the Marklin train set laid out on the polished pine floor by the small windows, were the objects of my foolhardy mission: the Citroen taxi, the JEP Hispano Suiza and Rolls-Royce, and the Marklin battleship being the most prominent. This man Treasure certainly had real class. He had arranged all ten (I now noticed one was missing — the P2 Alfa Romeo) as if the young boy was still in the process of opening them, the gift wrapping still clinging to some of the boxes, and ribbon bedecking the floor. Some of the tinplates were only half visible atop their packing — it was as if Treasure wanted to freeze time; and I remembered Monsieur Vincent, and that strangely charming room in the south of France.

  I was about to pick up the Citroen, when I suddenly felt I was being watched. I spun round, and, in the corner, seated in a chair, was the childish figure of a boy. I got up off my knee, and was about to stammer something, when I noticed the fingers of his left hand. One was slightly chipped. I slowly approached him and I saw he was, in truth, a wondrously formed plaster dummy dressed in schoolboy uniform: a grey flannel, long-trousered suit, grey shirt and a bright striped tie I didn’t recognize. His size seemed to indicate he was supposed to be about thirteen or fourteen, which seemed to me a little old for the toys he was supposed to be playing with. But that was the least of my concerns, as I was startled back to reality by the sound of tyres on gravel. I ran across to the window, kicking a railway carriage off the rails in my rush, and looked out. It was the Land-Rover, and Ken Gates. It was pulling into the courtyard to park right outside, where I had seen it when I first arrived.

  I realized I could not escape Ken Gates’s loving clutches with eleven (correction, ten) priceless and fragile tinplate toys strung around my person, nor was there time to take them, so reluctantly I left them in the strange room and descended that spiral staircase as fast as I could. At the oak door to the barn, I stopped and listened. I could hear hobnails on the cobbles, but the noise did not seem to be getting louder. I inched the heavy door open and peered outside. There was no sign of lover-boy, only the rear part of the Land-Rover being within my eye-line. I did my spreading myself against the wall act, and crabwised my way out, and along the stone wall towards the back of the building, from where I might be able to sprint back to the hedge without being seen.

  The hobnails seemed to be going farther away, so I continued my slow progress along the side of the building. As I did so, I tripped over something in a tuft of grass, and it let out a loud clank. I looked down, and saw it was part of an old wooden plough. Beside it was a pile of rusty chains, which were the noisy culprits. I could no longer hear the hobnails, so I assumed Gates had gone to the house, or into another barn, but I picked up the piece of old plough shaft, just in case, and continued edging my way along. It seemed an eternity before I reached the corner of the building, from where I could see, about a hundred yards away, my little gap in the hedge. At last, plucking up courage, I began my sprint towards it. Instantly, I heard heavy footfalls and, looking to my right, I saw Gates coming at me like a charging bull. Neither of us said a word, and I knew he had recognized me.

  Now I’m not a bad runner (about the only thing I won at school, beyond exasperation from the teaching staff, was the annual cross-country), but fresh air and farmwork had obviously given Gates a distinct edge. He got me in a flying tackle some fifteen yards from the hedge. I slammed forward into the ground, and all the breath went out of me, but, surprisingly, my dark glasses stayed on — not a great plus point, as I had a feeling Gates hadn’t quite the sensitivity not to hit a chap who wears spectacles. I was right. After he had rolled off, he picked me up by my sweater, and then swung at my jaw with the nobbly concrete of his fist. My glasses left my face and hang-glided towards the hedge. I free-fell to the ground, and my spine hit something bumpy. I suddenly realized what it was, and as he launched himself down on me again, I reached under me, grabbed the plough shaft, and struck him across where I thought his head would be at the time. I heard it make contact, and a shock wave went up my wielding arm. But the worst bit was to follow. His dead weight collapsed across my body, and I felt I had been hit with nothing less substantial than the Empire State Building with bad breath.

  It took me about two minutes to pull what was left of myself together, regain my breath, and ease myself free from the mass of muscle on top of me. I had the good grace to check his pulse, before I crawled to the gap in the hedge. It was pumping away as good as new. I pelted as fast as I could Beetle-wards, before it pumped some modicum of sensation back into his brain.

  *

  It wasn’t really until I got home, sore chin and sore shoulder again (the fall had not done it much good), that I realized what I had achieved that morning. Even Bing seemed to sense my excitement, and kept rubbing himself against my still shaky legs. I had, with one exception, beaten Mr Chalmers’ deadline for the recovery of his £22,000-worth of classic toys. True, they weren’t actually in my hands yet, but I knew where they were, and who had stolen them. I celebrated with a large Scotch and soda.

  But as my larynx grew warmer, I grew worried. It dawned on me that Treasure might move the toys to a new hiding place, and I actually had no proof at all that they had been in the barn. He could claim I had a grudge against him for opposing the excavation of the Spitfire and was throwing unfounded accusations about just to harass him. What’s more, he could have me up for breaking and entering — twice.

  I wondered whether I ought to inform Inspector Blake, but remembered what he had said about the Police Benevolent Fund. Nevertheless, I gave him a call and was told he was out and not expected back today, so I gave up the idea — for the moment. Also, any publicity about the toys’ recovery might be an embarrassment to Mr Chalmers, who had stressed secrecy from the first moment he had contacted me about the French collection. And, in a way, there was another factor, quite a telling little factor. I knew I wanted to pursue privately the riddle of Mr Treasure to the very end — and I suspected the toys were only a fraction of his conundrum. He seemed to be over fond of hiding things and maybe Mrs Veronica Treasure had been another toy he had buried away. But how the blazes would we ever know? And it was then, I remembered the diaries.

  After lunch, I put Bing on his lead and went round to see Gus. The sun had come out, and in contrast to the chill of the morning, the day had now decided it was summer. About time.

  *

  ‘From now on, would you, for Christ’s sake, tell me what you are going to do, before you do it?’ Gus grumbled into his large mug of tea. ‘I might be able to help you, or at least it would give me more time to get a decent wreath.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gus, but I lost the toys, not you.’

  ‘You’ll lose your head, if you’re not bloody careful,’ he replied. He offered me a bit of seed cake, which I accepted and ate with relish. It always reminded me of boyhood teas on a winter’s afternoon, and the spitting of fresh logs on the fire. Sometimes I think our joint passion for seed cake was one of the major things that bonded us together. That and beer.

  ‘Well, come on,’ he said impatiently.

  ‘Come on, what?’ I replied.

  ‘Come on and tell me what you’re going to do next, seeing as how you won’t let the police do the job for you, like you should. After all, you’re paying for them, with your rates and taxes. Why not use them?’

  ‘You know why, Gus. I don’t thin
k they’ll ever get to the truth about Treasure by conventional methods. Blake’s hopeless — completely out of touch until tomorrow. The rest of them are worse. After all, they didn’t find my toys. I did.’

  ‘But you haven’t got them yet, my lad.’ He sipped the last of his tea with a giant slurp. ‘And maybe you never will.’

  ‘Maybe, but I think I will. I have a feeling I’ve got a way of winkling them out of him. It only came to me as we’ve been sitting here.’

  ‘And you’re not going to tell me what it is?’ He got up and put his mug to join the mountain of unwashed crockery in the kitchen. (Gus had a blitz on household chores once a week — a lot of china gets smashed, though.)

  ‘I’d better, otherwise you might ask me to move my Daimler v8 from your garage.’ I grinned at him, but he just pulled at his sweater, a nervous habit of his.

  ‘I’m going to ring him, in my own voice this time, and say …’

  ‘Say you’ve seen the toys? Where will that get you?’ he interrupted.

  ‘No. I’ll say I have some news from his wife, and I would like to come round and discuss it with him. I won’t mention the toys at all — not on the phone.’

  Gus thought a minute.

  ‘Ah, I think I know what you mean. But you’re playing with fire.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Bugger “maybe”; you bloody are. If he can murder once, he can murder again. And you won’t be wearing a nice blue uniform and carrying a truncheon, will you?’

  ‘I’m not going alone.’

  He pointed down to Bing who was curled up on the threadbare carpet.

  ‘He’s not going to be much help to you.’

  I laughed and Bing twitched his ear.

  ‘No, it’s not Bing. I’m taking you with me.’

  He stretched his long legs out, and crossed them. ‘Oh, you are, are you? Well, we’ll have to see about that.’

  I looked at him with amazement.

  ‘Gus, you’ve been castigating me for not involving you for the last hour, and now I bow to your wishes, you play hard to get.’

  He smiled. ‘Well, I’m not actually saying I won’t go with you. There’s just a little something I’d like you to help me with tomorrow afternoon, in return, like, for my agreeing.’

  ‘What’s that? If it’s not transporting another piano on the roof of your Popular, I might consider it.’

  He made a church and steeple with his fingers.

  ‘Well, it’s like this. Old Mrs Blunt we moved the furniture for, remember? She told her daughter-in-law about how I shipped it round, and now she’s got me to promise I’ll pick up a dining table and chairs for her. Got to go from Swanage to Mudeford. Not very far, just across Bournemouth Bay.’

  I did not need to think before I accepted.

  ‘Agreed, Gus. Tomorrow afternoon. But keep near the shore, you sod; you know how I hate water.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘now when do you want to go and see Treasure?’

  ‘As soon as he’ll see me.’ I got up, and Bing dutifully followed suit. I think he had had enough of feeling the boards through the carpet. ‘I’ll get back and ring him now. I’ll drop down later and let you know. Okay?’

  He saw me to the door, and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s a deal, you know,’ he said firmly.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ I replied, and was truly thankful it was.

  Ten

  Randolph Treasure seemed to be out every time I phoned, and I did not dare leave my name when Mrs Fitzpayne, the housekeeper, asked for it. However, I followed another of my dear mother’s cliched phrases, tried and tried again, and got through to him at around eight o’clock in the evening. He sounded none too pleased to hear from me, and, from his tone, I think he must have worked out who the guy from Liverpool was, which was not very difficult really. He only had to read the bump on Ken Gates’s head.

  But my trump card worked and he reluctantly agreed to see me at nine-thirty the next morning, but pointed out this would be the very last time he would allow such a visit. I said we would have to see about that.

  After I had rung off, I could not get him out of my mind. And I found, though I tried my damnedest, I could not quite hate him as much as I had. I think it was that room with the child dummy, and the diary. Mr Treasure was turning out to be by no means as shallow and insensitive as I’d thought him. I tried to imagine his hairy hands deftly arranging the details in that room, the clothes on the dummy, the tying of the tie, the setting up of the railway, the hanging of the Tipp, Meccano and Marklin aircraft on the thinnest of thin lines from the beams of the ceiling. The secret soul of Randolph Treasure — a world of innocence perhaps, to atone for his guilt, a world of obsessive attention to detail, of fanatical devotion to objects, beyond anything I’d ever seen in other collectors. I began to pity him, and kicked myself for doing so.

  Then I did as I had promised. I went down and told Gus. I said I would pick him up around nine o’clock. He said, did he need to shave. I said no, because I would be leaving him in the Beetle in the driveway. He shrugged his shoulders, and that was that.

  I came back home, and tried to resume reading my current book, Woody Allen’s Getting Even, which I hadn’t touched for days, but my tension interfered with his rare talent to amuse. I switched on the box, but soon decided American soap opera could not wash my mind clean tonight. I went into the kitchen and followed Gus’s culinary curriculum. I opened four tins. One, Whiskas. Two, button mushrooms. Three, baked beans. Four, corned beef. The last three were for me, although you would never have guessed it, the way Bing pestered me.

  I heated what needed heating up, and ate this rare meal on a tray in front of the News at Ten on ITN. They had just come to the first commercial break, when Arabella arrived. I immediately saw from her face that something was very wrong.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked, once she had settled down in the sitting-room.

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ she replied quietly.

  ‘What?’ It was stupid of me to ask.

  She got up abruptly, and began pacing round the smallish room.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. Smashed windows, smashed doors, bashed farmhands. Who do you think you are — Dirty Harry?’

  I got up and tried to calm her, but she shrugged off my arm. That annoyed me a little. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I found my toys in Treasure’s barn, in the attic bit. I had to do all those things to find them.’

  ‘Sod your bloody toys, Peter. Can’t you men think of anything else? Oh, I’ve forgotten, you can think of sex too. What a great combination — toys and sex, toys and sex.’

  I took hold of her shoulders, and shook her.

  ‘I have to pay Chandler £22,000 in two and a half weeks’ time, and unlike your friend, I don’t have that kind of money to spare. The police aren’t getting anywhere and there were no grounds for applying for a search warrant. And anyway,’ I went on, working myself up, ‘this man Treasure you hang around with so often is a dangerous animal. It’s far more serious than just my bloody toys, as you put it. He could be a murderer.’

  She looked up at me. I went on, ‘Yes, a murderer. That skeleton we found when we were digging for the Spitfire could be that of his dear, philandering wife, Veronica. The one who was supposed to have gone off to join her lover in Lausanne. Now are you getting the message?’

  She slowly let me lead her back to the settee. I sat down beside her. She did not say anything for a moment, then asked quietly, ‘Did you get that from the police?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, equally quietly. ‘I deduced it myself. But I think the police may be working their way towards the same sort of conclusion.’

  I held her close and I could feel her sobs.

  ‘I want you to promise, you won’t go back to him,’ I said eventually. She did not reply. I suddenly decided that now was the time to ask her. ‘You’ve got to tell me, Arabella, whose side you’re on. His or mine. You can’t be on both sides at the same time.’
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  Again she did not reply. I let go of her, and made her sit up. Her eyes were brimful of tears, and some mascara had run.

  ‘Okay. If you won’t tell me, I am assuming you are really on his so you’d better get out right now.’ I got up and grasped her wrist. She saw I was deadly serious.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you if you’ll sit down again.’ I did so and she began. ‘At first, I was on his side. Of course, I had to be. I didn’t know you. He asked me to keep an eye on you so I did. I hung round those places that I thought you might frequent. You know, the pub, the beaches, and I followed you once in my car all the way to Bristol and back. Did you spot me?’

  I admitted I hadn’t. She was evidently more expert than Quinky. But then, maybe, Quinky had wanted me to see her.

  ‘Why did he ask you to shadow me?’ I asked.

  ‘Said you were a trouble-maker, accusing him of having stolen some of your old toys. He said you might even be the thief. He needed to know what you were doing, if you were up to anything. I supposed he needed something to nail you with. Randolph likes nailing people.’

  ‘So you went along.’

  ‘Yes, I went along.’

  ‘And how much did you report back?’ I asked, in a rather hard voice.

  ‘Just the bare facts.’

  ‘How bare, my darling? About our little naked rompings between the sheets, about how good or bad I was in bed? Maybe he loves vicarious sexual descriptions. Turns you both on something rotten …’

  She slapped my face hard, and in retrospect I thoroughly deserved it. She got up and made for the door.

  ‘If you think that badly of me, you won’t want me around you ever again.’ She opened the door. ‘If you want to know, I’ve been trying to help you ever since that first night. I haven’t ever wanted to have anything to do with Treasure after you, you idiot. I only went back to see if I could be of some use …’

  I just managed to stop her before she reached the shop, and pulled her into my arms. That night, what little sleep we had was restless.