Tinplate Read online

  It took me an hour and a half to convince the po-faced lot of the Bournemouth division that I was not the man at whose door they could lay every burglary carried out in Bournemouth in the last twenty years. If you’ve ever been in a police station you will know it takes you half an hour to explain who you really are, rather than anything else, let alone refute accusations about every job they want sewn up. And, by that time, I was beginning to feel I would soon be dying of pneumonia if I did not get into some dry clothes pretty sharply. They finally agreed to let me go, and it was, at that point, that I felt it safe to begin asking them some questions of my own. Like where Vivian Stone had gone, for instance.

  ‘We don’t know for sure, Mr Marklin. All we can ascertain is that he left Heathrow on a Swissair flight to Geneva. Whether he’s still there, we have no idea.’

  I remembered Stone saying he was opening a new store there. Or, at least, claiming he was.

  ‘You have an interest in him, then?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘I don’t think I should answer that, Mr Marklin. That’s police business.’

  ‘It’s my business too. He may have some property of mine, and I want to get it back.’

  ‘Oh.’ The constable seemed decidedly interested. ‘And what property might that be, Mr Marklin?’

  ‘Toys. Old toys,’ I replied, and knew it was the wrong answer immediately. His interest evaporated.

  ‘Well, if we hear anything about … er … your toys, Mr Marklin, we’ll let you know.’

  I played the only card I had left.

  ‘They are worth £22,000.’

  My card turned out trumps, and five minutes later I was ushered into a much more civilized room at the station with a large desk at one end.

  ‘Come in, Mr Marklin. Let’s hear about these playthings of yours.’

  And it was then that I met Detective Inspector Trevor Blake, known as ‘Sexton’ to the criminal fraternity.

  *

  He was around forty-five and a big man. Not fat. It was all bone and gristle — the burly stuff of a million scrums. But his face did not quite fit the rest for it was the face of an academic, finely chiselled, as they say, and with eyes that didn’t just see, but probed and penetrated. I was quite impressed.

  I took him through my tale of woe, but left out some of the names, like Chalmers and Vincent, saying I had to preserve my clients’ anonymity. (I felt like Philip Marlowe for a minute.) Of course, I didn’t mention any other of my suspects — especially someone as locally important as Treasure. I didn’t want trouble. Blake sat impassively and listened, and didn’t even castigate me at the end for not having told the police before.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Marklin, do you really think Stone took them? I’m a great believer in instinct — greatest weapon in a policeman’s armoury is instinct.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but his sudden flight is rather strange, don’t you think?’

  He didn’t move a muscle. ‘Like you, I don’t know, Mr Marklin.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘you’re pretty interested in Stone, aren’t you? For other reasons?’

  ‘I would be a fool to deny it, Mr Marklin.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘You may. Mr Stone traded heavily in diamonds. Now that’s quite natural, you might think, in the jewellery business. But recently there has been a series of robberies carried out in the Hatton Garden area of London. We were just beginning to get some leads onto, not the actual thieves maybe, but the fences, shall we say. And then Mr Stone decided to leave us.’

  He smiled, and I knew I would not get any more out of him than that. All I was interested in was getting out of my wet clothes.

  ‘And you’ll interview him in Geneva?’ I tried.

  ‘Maybe. If we can find him.’

  I looked at the rain outside.

  ‘Still,’ I said lightheartedly, ‘a trip to Geneva will make a change for you, instead of sitting here in Bournemouth every day.’

  He smiled again. ‘I don’t sit here every day, Mr Marklin, not normally.’

  He could see from my expression that I didn’t quite follow him.

  ‘It’s all very simple. I’m from Scotland Yard.’

  Just as I was recovering from this surprise, he tossed another googly.

  ‘And by the way, Mr Marklin, you don’t, by any chance, have in your stock a Schuco Kommando Anno 2000, do you? I’ve been after one for years.’

  Six

  By the next day I felt considerably relieved that the police were now informed of my little tragedy, as I realized I had had twangs of conscience before about their non-involvement. What’s more, there was no way now that I could keep track of Vivian Stone without their help. And there was another thing: I kind of liked Trevor Blake. I just hoped he didn’t scuttle back to London before I had resolved my personal dilemma — or we had resolved it maybe.

  I had another pretty good bit of news too. The agreement to the Spitfire’s excavation was all over the local papers, and even got on television, I was glad to see, though the sight of the Vicar hamming it up was a bit sick-making — especially if old Mrs Blunt was right in her suspicions. I got a phone call from the Historical Aviation boys saying that they would be moving in on the site with their digger the next morning. We all agreed that the swifter the action now, the less chance there would be of any other local objections.

  So the fact that my deadline from Chalmers was ticking inexorably nearer became temporarily veiled by other events, and for at least one night I began sleeping again. Lonely, but sleeping.

  Gus and I were on site early the next day, and I insisted on taking him to Swanage in my car this time. He complained of the softness of the ride the whole way, which I could understand as his own Ford Popular rode the road like a board.

  The digger and crew were already there, and the likely area marked out with tape and wooden pegs. I said ‘Hello’ to ninety-four year old Joshua Phipps, who was the tenant farmer of the land at the time of the Spitfire’s crash, and had identified the exact location with stunning certainly. ‘About ten yards out from the big oak, it were.’

  Luckily the big oak was still there, only even bigger I suppose. I just hoped Farmer Phipps’s memory was as strong, otherwise we would all look a bit silly and feel more than a little frustrated.

  By the time the digger actually started operating, quite a crowd had collected, as had been prophesied by the proponents of doom and gloom. The Vicar, by then, was in the centre of things, with a gaggle of pressmen crowding him. About ten minutes into the dig, I saw the ominous shape of the Silver Cloud parking about fifty yards up by the side of the hedge. At first my heart sank, but it bobbed up again as I realized it gave me the natural chance of further conversation with Treasure.

  As always in digs of this kind, progress was slow and, to most outsiders, boring. The remains of crashed fighters of World War II are often found fifteen feet or more below ground due to the massive weight of the engine, and every inch of earth has to be examined stage by stage to discover smaller, lighter items of the aircraft, which had been ripped apart on the way down. The gruesome bits would probably be quite a distance underground, still, maybe attached to what remained of the seat or cockpit area. We knew we would be recovering only small, fractured pieces of the Spitfire, not whole sections of the airframe, for the impact always shattered everything to smithereens, with the usual exception of the solid mass of the Merlin engine, and, sometimes, the propeller.

  There was a round of applause as we found the first evidence that Farmer Phipps’s memory had not failed him: a small rectangle of twisted metal, which one of the team identified immediately as the rear-view mirror from atop the Spitfire’s windscreen. Then for a further hour we found nothing — except soggy earth that is. As we clustered round the widening and deepening hole, we thanked God it wasn’t still raining and, from the forecast, wouldn’t until nightfall. Then we came upon a spate of small, severely damaged items: the remains of a fuel gauge, a rev counter, a trim
wheel and the base of the Spitfire’s radio mast. A quarter of an hour later we found slightly larger pieces: the throttle quadrant, firing button, a bit of wing rib and undercarriage warning horn. Each was carefully washed with a hose and put in large cardboard boxes the Historical guys had brought along for the purpose.

  I spotted Treasure standing right by the oak tree but there was no sign of Arabella. He didn’t look too pleased and avoided eye-to-eye contact with me. When we broke for lunch half an hour later, I saw him stride up the field and make for his Silver Cloud. He came back with a small hamper basket that shouted Fortnum and Mason if ever I heard one.

  Gus and I fetched our sandwiches and Heineken from the Beetle. We were feeling pretty pleased with things. It was quite moving to see the relics meet the light of day for the first time since that momentous August in 1940. But I knew the afternoon might be a little disturbing as we dug deeper and wider, and the remains were not all made by Vickers-Supermarine. We downed a six-pack between us and polished off the sandwiches as if they had just been invented, for the May air was still a little nippy and we had worked up an appetite. I looked at my Seiko (a present from one of my old advertising clients), and saw there was still another quarter of an hour before the dig was due to resume. I decided to spend a bit of it with a shooting stick and a Fortnum’s hamper.

  He didn’t even look up from his glass of champagne when I arrived. That really annoyed me.

  ‘Trying to read the bubbles, Mr Treasure?’

  He could not avoid looking at me now.

  ‘What’s that, Marklin?’ His timbreful voice was a shade too loud, as always.

  ‘Reading the bubbles, I thought, might be a wealthy man’s version of reading tea leaves.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What did you see in your tea leaves for today?’

  ‘I saw a Spitfire being delivered to its rightful home — a Warmwell museum — and a gallant pilot being delivered into the arms of his God, Mr Treasure. What did you see?’

  ‘I saw you, Mr Marklin, unfortunately, making a nuisance of yourself as usual.’

  I moved round out of the light to his other side. I wanted to be able to see him properly.

  ‘Mr Treasure, you know I’m not a mischief-maker. I just want to see people’s rights and desires are not trodden all over. And that pilot’s mother has the right to know her son is going to have a proper burial.’

  He did not respond, unless pouring himself another glass of champagne was as good as an answer. I changed tack.

  ‘Mr Treasure, as you are a fellow toy enthusiast, I would love to see your collection some time. I hear you’ve got some really rare little items.’

  He looked up for a split second, but his eyes betrayed nothing beyond what seemed to be boredom. I persevered, on my old mother’s maxim of ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. (My mother, by the way, is still alive and well in Charmouth. She is more full of clichés than a politician is of wind.)

  ‘A little bird told me that you had recently acquired quite a few more. A mint JEP Rolls-Royce, for instance.’

  Nothing registered — even his hand didn’t shake the bubbles. I ploughed on. ‘A CIJ Alfa Romeo, and a Tipp steam lorry, a Citroen taxi cab. Eleven pieces in all. Everyone of them mint. Oh, and the piece de resistance was a Marklin battleship, I’m told.’

  He smiled ‘By your little birdie again?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘What’s the name of your little birdie, Mr Marklin?’

  ‘Why are you interested, Mr Treasure?’

  ‘I’m not, Mr Marklin. I just feel that if there are liars and misin-formants about, I should know who they are, that’s all. So that I can avoid them myself.’ His voice had taken on a sarcastic tone, which I did not find particularly endearing. He continued, ‘I only wish I had discovered some of those items you ramble on about — at a reasonable price, that is. People are asking far too much for old toys these days. It’s all those international auctions that do it, in London and Paris and Geneva and New York.’ He turned away and put his glass back in the hamper.

  By this time, I knew I had ventured but gained nothing from our encounter. I was no nearer divining whether he was the guilty party than I was with Vivian Stone or Rankin. But I did note that I seemed to be hearing an awful lot about that lake-side resort in Switzerland in the last few days.

  I left him, and went back to Gus, just as I heard the digger start up again. It wouldn’t be long now before we would know more of the fate of Pilot Officer Redfern.

  *

  Gradually, the cardboard boxes began filling again. First a turning indicator, and some small instruction plates, then our biggest find to date, a wheel, complete with its tyre. (When washed, the latter looked almost as good as new.) Soon after, the digger unearthed an elevator trim tab, and about an eighteen-inch section of camouflaged airframe. Then some ammunition from the .303 Brownings, which the men from the Air Ministry promptly took away, quite rightly.

  Then, very suddenly, the flow of relics ceased and it was soon clear there were no more in that particular section. So the digger moved some ten feet or so back towards the oak tree, and started afresh, and with renewed success.

  1 won’t bore you with everything we found, but this second dig made it all very worth-while from our proposed museum’s point of view, for it was here we found our biggest remains: the Merlin engine, more or less intact, which we had to winch out, the three-bladed propeller, horribly bent but not totally fractured, the armoured windscreen, amazingly still in one piece, with a bit of its frame.

  But we were surprised to find that when we uncovered the main part of the seat, complete with some of its cushion and Sutton harness, there was no sign that a pilot had been in it at the time of impact. There were no bodily remains, no fragments of any clothing or flying helmet or goggles, and no parachute. Nearly all previously excavated crash sites where the pilot was thought to have been on board had revealed some traces of the pilot. I didn’t dare look at Treasure. And I didn’t like to reflect on the disappointment old Mrs Redfern would feel when she heard.

  Once there was nothing gruesome to gawp at or photograph, the press drifted away, no doubt to various hostelries, which were on the point of opening for the evening. Gus and I tried to persuade the Historical boys to have one last go a little further out from the tree than the original hole, just in case, somehow, the pilot’s body had been thrown clear of the aircraft during its crushing journey into the bowels of the earth. After a lot of muttering, they agreed to put in an extra hour. The digger moved round and started up once more.

  This time, we did not have to wait long. Only some two feet or so under the turf, we came across the first bones. I shouted for the digger to stop, and we all grabbed spades and began carefully lifting the soil off the rest of the pilot’s remains. Within the hour we had found an almost complete skeleton, but, seemingly, not the top part of the skull. He seemed to be lying almost as if he had died peacefully, and not rammed into the unyielding earth at over 400 miles an hour. Indeed, nearly all his bones were intact, which made us believe he must have been either partly or totally out of his aircraft at the moment of impact. And, although the comparative shallowness of his resting place lent weight to that theory, somehow or other, I felt uneasy.

  The Vicar, tended by the Air Ministry representatives and the police, supervised the collection of what was left of the Battle of Britain hero, and conducted a short service, as a coffin was brought to transport his mortal remains to St Sebastian’s, whence they would be taken to a forensic laboratory for the usual examination to determine the exact cause of death — as if we didn’t know.

  I felt almost sick with the emotion of the day, and declined to go into Swanage for a few drinks with our friends from the Historical Aviation Society. So did Gus and we drove home together in silence. Then the rain started again as if the skies were sad too. Just as Gus got out of the car at his front gate, he said, in almost an offhand manner, ‘Funny, I hadn’t thought of it before. But we didn’t find any bits of his clot
hing, did we? Nothing. Can’t have flown it naked, can he?’ And once again, he uncannily read my own thoughts.

  So it was Pilot Officer Redfern, and not Chalmers this time, that caused me to lose my beauty sleep yet again.

  *

  The next day was Sunday, but not a day of rest. For many vintage toy people, collectors as well as dealers, Sunday is a day for attending one or other of the countless toy swapmeets, that are held regularly all over this country and Europe. And today I had fixed, months before, to go to the Bristol event, where I had booked a table. These enthusiasts’ meets are held in large exhibition or conference halls, and each dealer can book as many tables, more or less, as he likes, on which he spreads his wares, rather like a village jumble sale, really. In the main, no real gems are ever traded this way. (As I’ve already intimated, they pass from collector to collector often via word of mouth, otherwise through a Phillip’s or Christie’s auction or similar.) But there is a lot there for the average punter with, say, up to £100 in his pocket. There’s not much tinplate; it’s nearly all die-cast — old Dinkies, Corgis, Matchbox, and, increasingly now, new merchandise. The last mentioned annoys me greatly. You shouldn’t be allowed to mix the old and the new, in my humble opinion. Instant classics aren’t my number.

  However, so be it. I had to go to earn a crust, and attempt to sell off some of my lower priced and more common items that you often have to buy as well, to get the goodie you’re after. So I packed the Beetle up to its shell with the die-casts, and took the winding roads up to the M4 and along to Bristol and its conference centre by the now rather attractive dock-side.

  I noted two other Bournemouth old toy dealers there — the resort has sprouted quite a few — and I passed the time of day with them as I was setting up my table. (Before the public is allowed in, the dealers sniff at each other’s stock, just in case there’s a little profit in incestuous trading, one with another.) At eleven, the main doors were opened and, as always, the first ten minutes were like the Second World War, with the keenest collectors willing to commit murder to get to the toy or toys they had their beady eyes on. After a while things settle down, and the scene relaxes into gentle pandemonium, which goes on the rest of the day until about four o’clock, when we all pack up and take our unsold stock home.