Tinplate Read online

  ‘I meet a lot of interesting people. But I also eat and drink well. And get to drive around in a Rolls when I feel like it. You know …’ She winked but I knew she was hiding something.

  ‘Treasure has filled a gap, hasn’t he?’ I guessed, and I could see from her expression I wasn’t far from the mark. ‘Companionship without commital?’

  ‘Without commital,’ she repeated quietly. ‘I wasn’t ready for anything more than that when I met him …’

  Her voice tailed away, and I didn’t follow it. When she was good and ready, I guessed she would tell me.

  There was a silence for a bit, then I changed the subject. I couldn’t think of anything more innocent than, ‘Don’t you have a job?’

  ‘You mean nine-to-five type of thing?’ I nodded.

  ‘Not exactly. I help my cousin at her nursery in Owermoigne most days of the week, sowing and tending plants, pricking them out, spraying them, weeding them, taking them to Weymouth market. The work load is uneven. Some days are very busy, others are not. But I like it. Working with living things is quite rewarding.’

  ‘Is that where you live, with your cousin in Owermoigne?’ I asked, hoping the reply would be ‘Yes’. I was lucky.

  ‘Yes. Most of the time. The only exceptions are when I’ve been out very late with Randolph. Then I stay in one of the thousand bedrooms at Doom Abbey, and lock the door, like a frightened fairy-tale maiden.’

  ‘And tonight?’ I asked with trepidation.

  ‘I’m locking myself in with you, if you’ll have me.’

  I didn’t say anything, and in a moment she broke from me, and lay on her stomach, her chin resting on her pillow. Suddenly I found the rising wind of the Mynd beginning to affect me all over again. I let it blow.

  Seven

  She left very early the next morning. And she did something no other girlfriend of mine has ever done at a similar stage of a relationship, without being asked, that is: she fed Bing before she went. Love me, love my cat.

  The Toy Emporium seemed very empty without her. For when she came into a room, you knew it. And when she came into a bedroom, you knew it many times over. I missed her with a kind of ache, for what I had intended to be mainly a means of getting at some of Treasure’s secrets had rapidly turned into something very different — what, I wasn’t quite sure yet.

  I took a cold shower (which was, in a way, like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted), brushed my teeth and shaved, like a good boy. One orange juice and a piece of toast later, I felt even worse for I knew I wanted to see her again, and, this time, it had nothing to do with Mr Randolph Treasure. But I didn’t know what her reaction would be a second time. Maybe I was just a toy she would only play with once, the novelty having vanished with the night, although my instincts told me she wasn’t like that and that her occasional brittleness was just a form of self-defence.

  In the end, I had to force myself to think of something else. The unfortunate thing was all the other things I could think of were worse, like where would I find £22,000 if I couldn’t find those tinplates. I would have to sell my entire toy collection (worth maybe £10,000 to buy, goodness knows how little if I needed to sell them — and in a hurry). I worked out that I could raise (if not repay) around £10,000 maximum on the house, via a second mortgage. While dear old Auntie had bequeathed the house to me in her will, I had been forced to mortgage a bit of it to enable me to get sufficient stock to interest the punters. Foolishly, I had voluntarily resigned (genuinely, not one of those tax fiddles) from the advertising agency where I worked, instead of making myself so obstreperous that I had to be fired (like everyone else does in the game) and be given a year’s salary as a golden handshake. As Deborah was always fond of pointing out — especially if other people were present — I was as good at looking after my financial affairs as Paul Getty was at recognizing pre-and post-war Dinky Toys. (For the non-cognoscenti, prewar ones usually have plain hubs to their wheels, and often white tyres, while post-war, of the same type, have ribbed hubs and black tyres. Much more of this, and you will be able to go into business for yourself.)

  So, all in all, I reckoned I had better find the toys if there was to be life after Mr Chalmers. I went back over in my mind what I had learned from the unique Arabella — confirmation of Treasure’s ambidextrous facility, and rather more to the point, his predilection for diary-keeping. Diaries can be very useful things — and not just to the writer. I decided that I had better acquaint myself with the diaries as soon as possible. The problem was how? Treasure did not even let his lady friends peruse every page, so he would hardly be likely to allow dear old tea-leafreading Peter Marklin. So, heinous though it might be, I had to find a way of reading his little jottings behind his back. My mind boggled. Even if I could find a way to do so, would the dear man have noted down his every thought and action? I strongly doubted he would have an entry of this sort: ‘9 May, trotted down to Dover, don’t you know? Took ferry, waited for ridiculous Volkswagen thing at Calais. Persuaded spotty seaman to steal toys on board, replace with plastic Camaros. Hah! Hah! Hah! Took them home in jolly old Silver Cloud thing. Played with them all evening until it was time for beddy-byes. Goodnight Diary, sweet dreams. See you tomorrow.’

  I got fed up with thinking, and opened up shop. In two and a half hours, my grand sales total amounted to fifty pence. One chipped Matchbox Mustang (no box, bent axles) to a nine-year-old boy who looked as if he had just invented chicken pox. (I looked at myself, quizzically, in the mirror for days, after that close encounter of the contagious kind.)

  But my whole outlook was changed by the next ding of the doorbell. I looked up and saw a nice shiny white car outside, and coming inside, the shiny white face of Detective Inspector Trevor Blake. I had a feeling he had not just come for the Schuco. Bing got off the counter and went back into the kitchen. He had had enough of policemen recently.

  After the usual pleasantries, the Inspector made it quite plain the sitting-room would be a better venue for what he had to say, than a public toy shop. So we went through. He declined my offer of coffee, and got straight to the point.

  ‘I had better disappoint you right away, Mr Marklin,’ he began. ‘I haven’t any more word on Stone yet. He apparently left his hotel in Geneva soon after he booked in. A search of his luggage by our Swiss colleagues revealed next to nothing — and certainly not any toys of yours, or rather, of your friend Mr Chalmers.’

  ‘Yes, that is a bit disappointing, to put it mildly,’ I grimaced. ‘So how else can I be of use to you?’

  ‘I don’t know quite yet, Mr Marklin.’ He smiled, and began looking a little less like an officer of the law. ‘Let me ask you a question or two first.’

  I was beginning to get a little nervous. What questions could he possibly want to ask me? He couldn’t suspect me of passing, or receiving, stolen diamonds — or could he? The thought made me blush, the first sign, so they say, of a guilty man.

  ‘Fire away,’ I said, with more than a slight crackle in my voice.

  ‘Well, it’s about your other little enthusiasm, Mr Marklin, your aviation interest. I gather you were one of the main protagonists of the excavation that took place over in Swanage last Saturday.’

  ‘Yes, but what has that got to do with Stone?’

  ‘Nothing, I expect, Mr Marklin. You see it’s a different case, but as I knew you slightly, I thought you might have a few comments to make on the dig that might prove useful.’

  I tried to imagine what on earth his interest could be in the Spitfire. After all, the police had been there during the whole of the recovery work, and had made no objections to anything we had done.

  ‘Well, try me. I’m a little non-plussed,’ I said, understating considerably.

  ‘It may come as a bit of a shock to you, Mr Marklin,’ he continued, ‘that you may have found your aeroplane, but it doesn’t look as if you’ve discovered your pilot yet.’

  ‘What do you mean? His remains went off for the usual examination to de
termine the exact cause of death, as if it wasn’t quite clear.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And it’s as a result of the examination that I have called on you, amongst other people.’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’ I stammered.

  ‘Well, your Pilot Officer Redfern has turned out to be a woman of about thirty-five years of age, who died some forty years or so later than the Battle of Britain; of what, we cannot as yet ascertain, due to certain parts of her skull still being missing.’

  Suddenly, all my misgivings about the pilot’s remains flooded back to me, and somehow softened the shock of the Inspector’s startling revelation. Even so, I was speechless.

  ‘Have I disappointed you yet again, Mr Marklin? It seems to be becoming a habit of mine.’

  I saw Bing put his head around the door and pop right out again. I envied his freedom.

  ‘I suppose you have, in a way.’ I got up and went over to the window. I needed to see something green and growing. ‘But you haven’t shocked me as much as you may imagine.’

  ‘May I ask why, Mr Marklin?’

  ‘Because Gus and I — Gus is a friend of mine, you understand — had a funny feeling about those bones. Where they were, only two foot or so down. And how they were arranged, too neat and tidy for a crash. And you see, there weren’t any clothes or parachute or goggles or anything, like you would have expected.’

  ‘Well, now you know why,’ the Inspector said quietly.

  ‘Yes, now I know.’ I looked back at him. ‘His mother will be terribly disappointed after all.’

  ‘We’ll not tell her just yet. We have now initiated an excavation of that whole area around the crash site. He could still be found, you know.’

  I didn’t answer, because my mind had suddenly thought of something else; something far removed from the Battle of Britain and 1940.

  *

  We broke for coffee just about then. I watched him as he drank, very slowly and carefully, almost weighing up each instant grain. Mine had gone before he was half way through.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Marklin,’ he said between sips, ‘why were you so very much in favour of the dig?’

  ‘I’ve told you, Inspector. To create a memorial to the gallant few from Warmwell aerodrome.’

  He looked up. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘What else could there be?’ I was getting a little irritated.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He put his cup down. ‘Some people fight for things just to annoy other people — not that I’m saying you are that sort of person. I don’t think you are.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said firmly. ‘And I know what you are hinting at. Has he been at you already?’

  ‘Who’s that, Mr Marklin?’

  ‘Good old Mr Randolph Treasure, the big rich cheese around these parts.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ He smiled. ‘You’re very perceptive, Mr Marklin. That’s really why I came to you. The police force is dominated nowadays by the diarrhoea of bumf flooding into and out of computers. It’s the age of science, we’re told at Police College. Think scientifically. Make use of every channel of communication. By that, they mean one channel. The computer channel. And the poor cadets are never told anything about using their own computers — the ones in their heads. The tuition should really be about intuition, as you might say. Then add the science.’

  I felt more at ease again, after that little sermon — a cry, obviously, from the heart, which at least proved he had one. He wasn’t just an academic face on a rugby player’s body. And he was a toy collector.

  ‘Tell me, before we go any further, why you are on this case as well as Stone’s? Shouldn’t you be back at Scotland Yard by now?’

  ‘I had no option, Mr Marklin. Bournemouth CID is up to its blue shirtsleeves in petty-and middle-weight crime right now, and I happened to be finishing off all I could do, this end, on the Stone affair when the results of the forensic examination came through. And Inspector Brough called me in. I don’t know how long the Yard will allow me to be on it, though.’

  I hoped at least as long as it took to get my toys back and, perhaps, to discover a great deal more about the owner of a local Victorian folly. But I kept quiet about all that.

  ‘Now I won’t keep you much longer,’ he continued. ‘It’s lunchtime, and I know you’ll be busy, but just a couple more questions. Firstly, what have you got against Mr Treasure, if anything? He raised the roof on the phone yesterday with Inspector Brough. Claimed you were persecuting him, and making unfounded insinuations and so forth. Doesn’t sound like you, I must say, Mr Marklin.’

  ‘Oh, it can do, it can do, Inspector,’ I replied. ‘I can ruffle when I get ruffled.’

  He smiled and waited for me to continue. I didn’t know whether I should, but I took the risk.

  ‘Look, Mr Treasure may be a bigwig round here, but that does not make him the nicest guy in the world, by any means. At least I don’t think so. He’s getting uptight because I’ve called on him and sort of “insinuated”, as he calls it, that he might have certain toys.’

  ‘Your certain toys?’

  ‘Yes, if you want to know, my certain toys.’

  ‘Have you any proof of your so called insinuation?’

  ‘None at all. Just hunch — your intuition, I suppose; my computer brain, maybe working overtime, maybe not.’

  ‘Well, tread carefully, Mr Marklin. Add science before you annoy him too much again, won’t you, otherwise Mr Treasure might stop contributing to the Police Benevolent Fund. You get my meaning?’

  ‘I get your meaning.’

  He rose to leave, and turned back to me as he reached the door. ‘Tell me, Mr Marklin, what your computer brain tells you about this unfortunate woman of thirty or so, who has retained only half of her skull? I would be very interested to know.’

  So I told him.

  He left soon afterwards, and, though still seeming quite friendly, I could tell that, while he might have forgiven my intuition, he might not forgive my acting on it on my own. Aye, there lay the rub. The bloody great rub. For Mr Chalmers’ deadline did not care two hoots about the leisurely pace of routine police enquiries. Or about me and my great Auntie’s house, and the Abbey National’s stake in it.

  I gave Bing his lunch, didn’t bother about my own, and then walked us both slowly over to Gus’s place. It was time.

  *

  Gus, of course, turned out to be one jump ahead of me. Or to be more accurate, one ahead, and around a half behind. Let me explain.

  He had chugged around to Swanage that morning in his boat to have his ancient engine seen to — it was misfiring on more cylinders than it had, apparently. Whilst on the quayside kicking his supersized heels, he had met an old mate of his who had told him the dig had restarted on the crash site, and there were hordes of police around. Gus, who is even more curious by nature than Bing, got his mate to trundle him to the field in his old Standard 10. (I’ve seen this car, and its condition makes Gus’s heap seem as if it’s still under guarantee. It’s only the windows that are holding it together.) He had stayed the morning there but had learnt precious little about what the police were doing. Pursuing enquiries surrounding the discovery of the Spitfire was the official line, which he didn’t really swallow. But as he was leaving, there was a bit of a commotion around the digger, and he gathered that another body had been found, and some items of pilot’s clothing. He’d found it curious as no Battle of Britain MK I or II Spitfires had two seats. That trainer version of the famous fighter came out much later — after the war’s end, in fact. So he had chugged his way back to Studland and, after downing some tinned tuna fish and baked beans — Gus lives almost solely out of tins; he won’t die like you and me; he’ll just rust away — had awaited my inevitable arrival with more or less the same tale. But I still had the up on him about the first body being a woman, if you can call that an up. And I told him, more or less, what I had told the Inspector.

  Gus just sat there and did not say a thing. It wasn’t as if we were drinking at the time
, though I could hear the evidence of a Heineken or two rumbling around in his stomach. Eventually, I just had to break the comparative silence.

  ‘Tenpence for your thoughts, Gus.’

  ‘Don’t get much for that these days, my old dear,’ was all I got in reply.

  ‘Well, give us what you’ve got, and blow the expense,’ I said, a trifle irritably.

  ‘I agree with you, really. I reckon old Treasure — or maybe one of the others of the leave well alone brigade — knew what was buried there and why. Probably never realized it was an old Spitfire crash site, otherwise they’d have buried it somewhere else. How long did you say they thought it had been there?’

  ‘Forty years or so less than Pilot Officer Redfern. That makes it only a few years.’

  ‘But the bones had no flesh on them — looked fairly old.’

  ‘Maybe the police have got it a bit wrong. But they won’t be forty years out, you can be certain.’

  Gus looked at me. One of his serious looks.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the Inspector everything you think?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You didn’t. You know you didn’t.’

  Here he went again.

  ‘All right, I didn’t.’ How does this man do it?

  ‘So why didn’t you come right out with it all, that you think Treasure killed his wife for having had it away all the time and hid her body in a field — not on his own land, you notice — a field with easy access from the road? Nice big boot that Rolls of his has got. Get a house in there.’ He got up and came over to me. ‘That’s what you reckon, isn’t it? And that she never bloody went to Switzerland at all.’

  I nodded. ‘You know why I didn’t. It’s bad enough telling the Inspector that he should investigate all those who were against the dig, and that one of them probably either knew, or was related to the poor woman who was killed, without earmarking a man who wields huge power around here, and up whose nostrils I have charged full tilt on too many occasions already.’