Die-Cast (A Peter Marklin Mystery) Read online

  Gus pulled the only chair in the main body of the shop up to the counter. He sat down with a sigh. I knew now I’d got him at least until Arabella returned from her reporting for the Western Gazette, and probably for longer.

  ‘Remind me how you got the invite. Me memory’s not what it was.’

  I didn’t correct him. His memory was exactly what it had always been. Either non-existent or highly selective, depending on how charitably one viewed it.

  ‘Arabella met her when she went to the Manor for that big PR shindig for the launch of that new perfumery range by Reinhardt, bearing Lana-Lee’s name.’

  ‘Oh yeah, Lana-Lee scents. Remember now. Knew it was something poncey or other. Took a shine to Arabella, I think you said.’

  I nodded, just as Bing jumped on to the counter, and began snorkelling between the stiches of Gus’s old sweater for any traces of his last fishing trip. By the familiar aroma, his quest would not go unrewarded.

  ‘Which is more than Arabella did to Maxwell. She only met him for a few minutes, but it was enough for her to understand his abysmal local reputation.’

  ‘Well, I expect he only came back to her to cash in on all the loot she must have got from Reinhardt for allowing her name and fame to be used.’

  ‘Could be. I gather his career as a motor racing commentator had ended and he’s too old to race any more himself, so he’s probably strapped for cash. But that’s not the point. It’s why someone as nice as Lana-Lee is supposed to be should let him back into her life at all.’

  ‘Funny, women are,’ Gus grunted. ‘Never know what they’re going to do next.’ He looked across at me with one of his more penetrating looks. ‘Still, I expect they keep a good table. Plenty to drink too, wouldn’t wonder.’

  I didn’t rise immediately to the hint. I thought I’d keep him dangling for a second.

  ‘It’s a small party, I gather, not a dinner invitation, Gus. Arabella doesn’t know her well enough for that. It’ll just mean standing about making small talk about even smaller topics, I expect, with the odd canapé and glass of wine to make it half bearable.’

  ‘Well, old son, at least it will be half bearable.’ He grinned, and raised his right elbow off the counter.

  ‘Okay, Gus,’ I capitulated, ‘come on in. I’ve got some Heinekens that suddenly seem to have your name on.’

  I ushered Gus behind the counter and into the house. But I didn’t like the look in his eye. It spoke of many more Heinekens than were stacked in the frigidity of my Electrolux. And I could tell the intended deliberation on my new business plan would soon be drowned in the froth of their downing.

  *

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Her question startled me; I did not even know she was awake. A soft shaft of moonlight caressed part of her left shoulder and breast as she rested on one elbow.

  ‘Come on now, Peter. We’ve been together long enough for me to know when I’ve only got half of you.’ She traced an imaginary pattern on my chest with her forefinger. I smiled down at her.

  ‘Which half of me is it?’ I asked.

  Arabella pulled herself into a sitting position, and the bedclothes obeyed gravity. There was just enough moon sneaking in through the half open curtains to highlight a few nascent goosepimples around her nipples. I put my arm around her, and hugged her to me, for the night was distinctly cooler than usual for early October. But in reality, I’d take any excuse.

  ‘Your left half,’ she grinned. ‘And I want to know where your right half has been ever since I came home tonight. It can’t just be all that alcohol you and Gus consumed. There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. I can’t disguise anything from you, can I?’

  ‘Would you want to?’

  ‘No. Not really. I just wished to get things straight in my mind before I told you. That’s all.’

  She gently broke away from my arm, and rolled on top of me. I did nothing to stop her.

  ‘Well, I’m not getting off until you’ve told me.’

  Her mouth was now so near to mine, I could feel her breath tickling my two o’clock shadow. I made to kiss her, but she pulled back slightly. ‘Ah, ah, Mr Marklin. I made love with half a man earlier tonight. I’m not complaining about the physical virility bit, just the mental application. I’m not indulging again, until that other bit of you has decided to come down to earth. Come on, give.’

  ‘All right.’ I reached out and switched on the bedside light. I think more clearly when I can see the person to whom I’m talking. ‘I’ve had an idea, my darling, that’s all.’

  ‘Goodness gracious,’ she smiled, ‘and what about? Us?’

  ‘Not really. It’s more about what supports us — or, rather me.’

  ‘The toy business?’ she said with a slight note of disappointment.

  ‘Yes.’ I put my hands around her face. ‘How would you like me to add another string to my bow?’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ she laughed.

  ‘I’m being serious,’ I persevered. ‘I’m planning a new enterprise.’ I made a noise as close to a trumpet fanfare as my mouth and throat could manage. ‘I’m setting up as a manufacturer.’

  She looked beautifully startled. ‘Of what, pray?’

  ‘Dreams,’ I replied, dreamily.

  ‘What kind of dreams?’

  ‘Nice ones. And, what’s more, dreams made reality — by yours truly.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ she smiled. ‘It has to be toys, knowing you. So you’re going to become the “Jim’ll Fix It” of the old toy business.’ She thought for a second. ‘I know, you are going to try to remanufacture items that are in short supply.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I’m going to make toys that are in shorter supply than that.’

  She looked extremely puzzled. I put her out of her misery.

  ‘The toys I’m planning will never have been in existence before.’

  ‘Not new ones,’ she gasped in mock horror. ‘You’ve always maintained old toy buffs who trade in brand new toys are letting the side down, and all that.’

  ‘No, not new ones in that sense. I’m going to produce toys that have become famous for never having been discovered. That is, if I can find a model maker who’s good enough to make the brass masters from which I can produce dies for small scale production.’

  ‘But if they’ve never been made, who will want them, Peter?’

  ‘All the old toy fanatics who have seen the old advertisements for them, or heard about their planned production. Take the first one I’m thinking of producing, the Dinky Toy de Havilland Flamingo pre-war air liner. Perfect photograph of it appeared in Meccano magazines in ’39 and ’40, but no example of it has ever been found. There are thousands of die-cast aircraft collectors across the world who would give their eye teeth for one of those. Same goes for a Dinky car shown around the same dates — a Triumph Dolomite Roadster. Again, a perfect photograph, but no actual car. Blueprints, however, have survived on that one. But not on the Flamingo, unfortunately.’

  ‘How did you suddenly come upon the idea?’ Arabella asked, after a moment’s mental digestion of my plans.

  ‘Well, this ex-RAF type wandered into my shop this afternoon, and offered me fifteen thousand pounds if I could find an original. So I reckon I could charge around fifty pounds each for replicas...’

  The next quarter of an hour was taken up in a description of Truscott’s visit, and a further amplification of the potential I saw from my new brainwave. Arabella, bless her, eventually seemed to see the same magic in it as I did.

  ‘You’re going to love doing this, aren’t you, my darling? You’re going to thrive on the active creativity of it all, in contrast to the rather passive role of just collecting and trading in vintage toys.’ She pulled the sheet around her shoulders and looked at me. ‘You’ve missed that a little, since leaving advertising, haven’t you? The actual act of creation, I mean.’

  I’d never really thought about my recent life that way, so
relieved had I been a few years ago to exchange the fickle, brittle world of an advertising agency for the quiet, gentle charm of developing my lifetime hobby of old toy collecting into a business that would just about support me. But, damn it, Arabella was right again. She seems to have a kind of sixth sense about people. Seventh and eighth too, I wouldn’t wonder.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I probably have missed that aspect.’

  ‘That could be the only fly in the ointment, then,’ she smiled. ‘For over the next few months, I may have to go on putting up with only half a man, so obsessed I can see you becoming.’

  This time for a change, I rolled over on top of her, simultaneously switching out the bedside light in a mid-turn display of manual dexterity worthy of a Burt Reynolds at his seductive best.

  ‘Right now, Miss Arabella Donna Trench, I’m just obsessed with you.’

  ‘All of you?’

  ‘All.’

  ‘It had better be,’ she breathed. ‘Otherwise I’ll sue that perishing Flamingo for enticement.’

  ‘We’re not married...yet.’

  ‘Oh, that’s true...’

  But by this time, we had again passed into that sensational land where rational argument has no place, and where nothing, but nothing, is done by halves — whatever Arabella imagines.

  2

  The next morning I felt decidedly chipper, and not just because the autumn sun was pretending it was summer, and Arabella had more or less given her blessing to my enterprise, although that helped. In the eighteen months or so since we had first become lovers, I had grown to respect her judgement in no small way. (I think the feeling is roughly mutual, thank the Lord.) After, she’d kissed my marmalady mouth and driven off in her Golf convertible to the Western Gazette, where she was an on-staff reporter. No, they don’t pay Golf convertible type money on that paper; Arabella’s parents are oozing with acres up in Shropshire, and drop a little of the harvest her way.

  I went to work on my Flamingo plan, for I did not intend to open up shop until the afternoon, and by lunchtime, I had worked out roughly everything that had to be done, but almost nothing about the exact means and cost of production. Still, I wasn’t really worried. Others had trodden this kind of path before, and had reached their goal. In the last ten years, many toy collectors have begun to produce their own original models in small quantities, mainly in white metal, and usually of particular cars or commercial vehicles they admire, which have never been covered by the major toy manufacturers. And to me aircraft certainly seemed easier to cast than the intricate shapes of automobiles.

  Basically, my scheme was simple: to produce the Flamingo exactly as Dinky had obviously planned around 1940. The twin-engined air liner would be in l/200th scale, therefore just over four inches in wing span. It would only carry surface detailing as indicated in the extant photograph and from other Dinky aircraft of the period. Painting would be a doddle, as the Flamingo was to have been all silver with black registration letters, G-AFYE, which, I could probably get from Letraset, or have a transfer maker produce for me. I knew where I could get the tiny metal wheels, which were simply held in place by pins.

  From my attic, I got down an old book I’d had for years, Aircraft of the Fighting Powers Volume I (revised edition published in 1943), which had fairly accurate 1/72 plans of the actual aircraft. They would then only need to be reduced to 1/200th scale by whoever was to make the brass master for the moulds. And there lay my major rub: who the blazes in Dorset was good enough to produce such a perfect brass master of the Flamingo? And how much would it cost?

  Setting those problems aside for a moment, I went on to packaging. Its design was really decided for me. It had to be a square cardboard box, covered in matt darkish blue paper, with a printed description of the aircraft on the cover — exactly as all medium and large-sized Dinky aircraft had been packed in the pre-war period. Not very inspiring looking maybe to a non-collector, but a magic design for the old toy buff, and a necessity if my reproduction Flamingo was to succeed. I dug out a spare Armstrong Whitworth Whitley box from my collection as a reference for the box maker I would eventually choose.

  By the time I did open up shop, I knew my very first priority was to find that model maker, for without him or her, I could not really proceed to the proper costing of my plan. The obvious solution, to ask one of my competitors to recommend someone, I eschewed, as I had no wish to alert them to my brain-wave at this early stage, otherwise I might well get pipped to the post.

  *

  Curiously, that afternoon brought more customers than I’d seen for a week, so I had little time to brew on ways to track down my quarry. However, I wasn’t grumbling, I needed the business to help pay for the obvious initial outgoings on the Flamingo, and keep my bank manager from grabbing pen and paper.

  A spotty youth in a studded black leather jacket that had seen better days (and, I suspect, better youths) shelled out £35 for a Spot-On Fifties Humber Super Snipe. A bald-headed man with thyroid eyes and an equally prominent tie, parted with £60 for a French CIJ tinplate Renault Frégate, and an equal sum for the same manufacturer’s Ford Vedette. And the big coup of the afternoon — £200 in fivers for a mint pre-war Dinky toy van with ‘Ovaltine’ transfers on the sides, from a bachelor school teacher.

  With £355 more than I’d started out with that morning, I felt even more chipper, and shut up shop at quarter to five to give me time to wash half Dorset off my old Volkswagen Beetle convertible, to make it decent for our evening drive to the Lana-Lee Claudell shindig at her reputedly magnificent manor house over Osmington way. It didn’t look too bad by the time I had put away the chamois and the Turtle wax — even the rust seemed to shine — but I needn’t have bothered. Obviously something I’d done, or omitted to do, that day, had upset the powers that be, for by the time Arabella, looking nonchalantly sensational with her newly cropped hair, boy’s style (rich boy!), and sporting a slim-line version of a man’s DJ and piped trousers, clambered into the Beetle, the heavens had opened with a vengeance. The raindrops were so big they actually hurt as I ran round to my side of the car — as if my new wing collar wasn’t paining me enough without that.

  By the time we had sloshed our way through the storm to Osmington, our spirits and our excited anticipation at being admitted to film star company, had been dampened somewhat by the drops of water that seemed to permeate every other stitch hole in my Beetle’s soft top. Arabella, by dint of holding an Ordnance Survey map of South Dorset over her head, arrived more dry than damp, but the same could hardly be said of me.

  I parked the Beetle between a sloping-backed Cadillac Seville and a Daimler Sovereign, to be as near the great Tudor porch as possible. But a butler had anticipated our arrival and came hurrying out with a Technicolored umbrella under which we ran into the Manor. As I shook myself in the hall, I suddenly remembered what I had forgotten because of the downpour. I patted Arabella on the shoulder of her dinner jacket, as the butler was trying to assimilate the idea of her turning out to be a girl after all.

  ‘Darling, would you mind making my apologies?’

  ‘Why, what have you done?’ she answered, smart as a whip, in a Groucho Marx voice.

  ‘Nothing. It’s what I haven’t done. Remember I said I’d pick up the boxes for those Minics Gus brought me?’

  ‘Do it on the way home.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘The old lady will be in bed by then. It won’t take me more than five minutes or so. It’s only round the corner and down the road to the sea.’

  The butler came to my rescue.

  ‘I will look after Miss Trench, sir, if you have a problem.’

  Arabella looked at me and smiled. The butler looked at me and didn’t smile. I looked away in embarrassment, and saw my reflection in the mirror. My sodden hair was raining drips down my nose. ‘Thank you.’ I said quickly, and with a split-second smile of my own, went back out into the rain.

  Luckily, the little old lady in Osmington Mills did not take an age to fin
d the boxes, although they did smell a little of the kinds of things you find in dustbins, and soon I was beetling back up the hill towards the main Weymouth road.

  It was not long after I had turned right at the junction that I saw it. Or thought I saw it. There’s a point where the change from unkempt wild hedgerow to well tonsured hedge plus stout wooden posts and laterals quite clearly marks the edge of the Lana-Lee property — it’s about two hundred yards from the entrance to the main drive up to the Manor. My headlights suddenly seemed to pick out a kind of white apparition or shape that seemed to be materializing from the rails and the hedge just a few yards within the boundary of the grounds. I thought, at first, I was just seeing things, but as I proceeded, the whiteness seemed to hesitate, then start to disappear again, as if into the hedge — or else into the night air. The clacking windscreen wipers did not aid my concentration, let alone my vision, and by the time I reached what I thought was the section of the hedge from which it had materialized, there was not a dicky bird to be seen. I drove very slowly along that area, then reversed and drove past it again. But, beyond a certain raggedness in the hedge in that general area, I could see nothing untoward, and certainly nothing white. I was now rapidly deciding the whole experience was a figment of my over-excited imagination, but had to admit that, even in my more inebriated moments, I had never conjured up anything quite as disturbingly real. And I mean disturbing! As I drove on, I literally shivered, and it wasn’t because of the chill of my wet hair.

  Once at the Manor, the butler did his Gene Kelly act again, and soon I was back in the dry, and being ushered into a vast drawing room, that seemed big enough to play professional football in — but far too gracious to contemplate such an event. At the far end, logs almost the size of trunks spat and glowed in the Elizabethan open fireplace, painting a group of figures standing beside it with flickers of orange light from its flames. I ran my fingers through my hair to anticipate any further liquid fall-out, and hunted for Arabella amongst the DJS clustered around a figure I could not quite make out, but who I assumed was our famous photogenic hostess.