Going It Alone (13 page)

‘I’m not exactly flattered.’ Dave said this without any apparent humorous intention. ‘It’s rather a slight, really – as if I can be scared and Tim couldn’t be. I wonder.’

This produced a moment’s silence, and then Tim spoke robustly.

‘Utter rot!’ Tim said. ‘And anyway, it remains true, broadly speaking, that the villains now have both of us on their shopping list.’

‘I don’t know that that is quite necessarily so.’ Averell said this rapidly, conscious that for him a moment of truth had come. ‘And, in order to explain what I mean, I’m afraid I must tell you about something extremely silly – and, in a way, totally irrelevant to this present business. I have a French friend called Georges.’ Averell paused on this, aware that it sounded quite idiotic. ‘Tim, I think you met him once when you were visiting me in Paris.’

‘The prince chap, who’s the split image of you, Uncle Gilbert?’

‘Yes, that’s right. And on this occasion, as it happens, I’ve come to England as him.’

‘You’ve
what
?’ Tim was goggling at his uncle. And so was everybody else – very much (Averell thought) as if he had suddenly been transmogrified into a two-headed calf.

‘And he has gone off to Italy as me. It hasn’t been exactly a wager; rather what we used to call, when I was young, a dare.’ Averell felt that he might decently soften the truth by sticking to this aspect of the thing. It was a genuine aspect in its way. ‘And then something very odd seems to have happened. It’s particularly odd since Georges isn’t a married man.’ Averell paused again, conscious that this trend in his attempted narrative was alarming his nephew a good deal. ‘Somebody must have decided to have Georges followed – trailed or shadowed, that is, by the sort of person who is called a private enquiry agent.’

‘Do you mean a private eye?’ Lou asked.

‘I suppose I do. And this one goes by the name – it’s really quite preposterous – of Gustave Flaubert. He caught up with me on the plane from Paris, and in one way and another followed me to Boxes. Anne, you now understand a little about this, don’t you? Because of what happened in the garden, I mean.’

‘Do I? Yes, perhaps.’ Anne sounded a shade grim. ‘Just who could have hired this person?’

‘I think it must have been a jealous mistress.’ Averell was not at all sure that it was proper to admit to the existence of mistresses, jealous or otherwise, in the presence of young English gentlewomen. ‘At first I thought that Georges was playing some sort of practical joke on me. He’s quite capable of it. But it can’t be that. It’s some woman who hopes to have Georges detected in – well, in an alternative irregular situation.’

‘With a rival tart, you mean?’ Lou asked baldly.

‘Just that. It was Flaubert, of course, who peered in at the drawing-room window soon after I arrived at Boxes. And who climbed up to my bedroom window in the night. He wasn’t one of this gang, mistaking my room for Tim’s, as Tim and I thought. He was really after me in what’s called a compromising situation. There was a sudden blaze of light woke me up, and that I vaguely took to be lightning. But it was Flaubert having a go with a flashlight camera.’

‘You mean,’ Dave asked with wholesome amusement, ‘that he hoped to snap you in bed, enarming a new mistress – “you” being, of course, supposed to be this prince person?’

‘Yes, precisely that. It’s all most disagreeable.’

‘It’s all bloody funny, if you ask me. Is there any more of it, Mr Averell?’

‘Yes, there is.’ It was Anne who broke in with this. She was probably conscious that in the regard of Tim’s elderly uncle the most embarrassing aspect of the story was yet to come. ‘The man
did
get a photograph – this morning. And he was so cheered that he put on an impudent turn on the strength of it. It so happened, you see, that Gilbert and I were sitting in a rather romantic arbour – or, at least, a summerhouse – and that I was blubbering on his shoulder, so that what Dave calls enarming was to be snapped for the asking. So Flaubert has his evidence that this prince man has skipped over to England for immoral purposes.’

‘Well, well,’ Dave said. ‘And good on you, Anne.’

‘I certainly agree that it’s a thoroughly absurd story, Uncle Gilbert.’ It was clear that Tim thought it distinctly unbecoming as well. ‘It’s the sort of thing that might happen to Mr Pickwick, or somebody like that. But I don’t see that it has much to do –’

‘God, Tim Barcroft, don’t be so thick!’ Dave exclaimed. ‘The point of it is that you were not followed to Boxes. It was your uncle who was followed to Boxes. Get?’

‘Yes, of course. But –’

‘And that means there’s no evidence that they’ve
added
me to you. They’ve
substituted
me for you. You’re
passé
, chum – entirely old-hat. And why? Well, forget about this Flaubert and his photographs, and think about yours. The relevant hunt-ball group of this gang of crooks. And the whole lot you took at Uffington Street. Where are they now?’

‘Where are they? In ashes, of course. Everything photographic I possessed went west in that big bang and the healthy baby fire that followed.’

‘Well, well, well. And did you hasten to tell anybody that?’

‘No, I didn’t. But I made a kind of inventory before I quit the flat and went home. I felt I was being businesslike in regard to the insurance, and so on. Only later I rather forgot about it. I must just have left it there.’

‘Jesus Christ, Tim! Anybody can walk into that flat.’

‘That’s true.’

‘These people now know the bomb didn’t get you – nor the car either. But they also know the photographs were destroyed, and they’re prepared to call it a day.’

‘All right.’ Tim managed a faint grin. ‘With me they are. But now it’s you.’

‘And why, oh why?’ Lou said. ‘When we get that we get somewhere. Let’s move.’

Perhaps because in France his acquaintance covered a fairly wide social spectrum (including characters like the Prince de Silistrie), Averell was not without experience of being driven furiously around in powerful cars. Even so, he was at times a shade alarmed by Dave’s performance on the final stretch of the M4. Dave kept in the fast lane, and was far from patient when held up on it because a car in front of him was trundling along at the mere permitted maximum of seventy miles an hour. On these occasions his use of a powerful if melodious horn was more vigorous than a proper courtesy would have allowed. Dave was no doubt eager to get cracking at what they were going to take a crack at (whatever this might be, for the matter remained disturbingly obscure). But it was also possible to feel that Dave was being more venturesome than he would normally be because he judged that it was up to him to vindicate himself in some way. He had possibly been irked by Anne’s little joke about the gang’s supposing him to be vulnerable to ‘milder courses’ than those they had directed against Tim. Young men, after all, are very sensitive to any aspersion cast upon their courage. Anne, indeed, hadn’t intended anything of the sort. It had been Dave himself who had twisted her remark that way. And this in itself was indicative. Averell made a mental note to try to keep a cautious eye on Dave. The boy might be prone to exhibit what a reader of Joseph Conrad would call the Lord Jim syndrome: to do a rash thing the moment an opportunity so to do turned up. Tim had been a little like this when he had insisted on wandering around the garden at Boxes waving a torch in face of what he had believed to be the possibility of lethal attack. Tim would be the more circumspect of the two young men, all the same. There was nothing particularly admirable about circumspection in itself. But it was to be commended, surely, when one happened to be toting around a couple of young women in the interest of running to earth a band of atrocious criminals.

These thoughts did credit to Gilbert Averell as an elderly person of chivalrous disposition. At the same time he was aware that he might more profitably be addressing his mind to something else: namely, to finding some persuasive means of bringing the entire freelance operation within the ambit of the law. But this was difficult, since all four of his companions were in the grip of another syndrome which might reasonably be associated with the name of Robin Hood. They were a band of jolly outlaws, intent on righting wrong without any recourse to a Sheriff of Nottingham or his latter-day equivalent in, say, an office at Scotland Yard.

Could he venture to tell them that they were in a muddle? They clearly had no strong feelings about a large-scale depredation visited upon a bank. Dave (rushing around in his expensive car) was probably quite capable of asserting roundly that all property was theft, and that if anybody lost out as a result of the raid (and it was the paradoxical truth that nobody in the world would at all intimately do so) it served them right for hoarding wealth that ought to be common to all. (This was a highly speculative assumption on Averell’s part, since in fact he knew little about either the minds of young people in general or the minds of the particular batch of young people with whom chance had so oddly implicated him.) What really commanded Tim and his friends was the sense that a harmless section of society – to wit, persons deprived of homes through no fault of their own – had been pounced on by the police and huddled off to unwarranted incarceration. Averell found he couldn’t very readily associate himself with this feeling – or not if, as he judged probable, this had been a temporary measure now liquidated. If one ‘squatted’ one couldn’t very reasonably resent certain occasional inconveniences to result.

But this was a persuasion which he could not perhaps without indiscretion admit to. And there was, of course, the absurd fact that, within the Queen’s realm, he was at the moment something of an outlaw himself. He hadn’t honestly admitted to this. He had fudged the full facts of his present embarrassing and unseemly position. So he now found himself cursing his wholly agreeable friend Georges’ fantastic sense of fun.

‘We’ll drive straight to Uffington Street,’ Dave said, ‘and see if any of the wretches have been allowed to return there. Tim, you agree?’

‘Yes, of course.’ But as Tim said this he had glanced for a moment at his uncle, as if from a sense that the senior member of the party ought to have been consulted first. This unthinking impulse of deference merely served to make Averell yet more ill at ease in his anomalous position, and he rather wished that he had stayed put at Boxes and left these four young people to their adventure. But had he done so he would immediately have felt himself to be irresponsibly deserting them. Or he would have felt this had he not contacted the police the moment they had driven off; and that was something they would have regarded as plain treachery. There was nothing for it but to bear his part. So he spoke up again now.

‘Will any of them have been let go back to this empty house?’ he asked. ‘Even, I mean, when they’ve been entirely cleared of having anything to do with the robbery. I’d suppose that once squatters were out they’d be kept out. Or at least that the owner of the place would come along and bar it all up.’

‘It’s the law again, Uncle Gilbert,’ Tim said – and with his customary air of being an authority on this subject. ‘The various forms of trespass are extremely dodgy, and the fuzz are always looking over their own silly shoulders at their own silly legal advisors. They’re scared of chaps in the Home Office, and scared of crusty old judges dozing away on their benches and in their chambers. So they go in for cunning inactivity a good deal.’

‘What we need is cunning of an active order,’ Lou said.

‘Call it just action,’ Dave said. ‘Pile into the scrimmage, and without being too particular about dangerous use of the feet. Nobody’s going to blow a whistle in this game.’

Averell didn’t find Dave’s image heartening. He dimly recalled mixed hockey as an extremely hazardous sport. Mixed rugger didn’t bear thinking about. He wanted to say, ‘But we’re not on a playing-field, and the people we’re after have twice attempted murder.’ But he refrained, aware that any wet-blanket effect he put up would now be merely counter-productive. And this was the state of the case when they arrived at Uffington Street.

It proved to be in a distinguishably run-down area near Holland Park. The houses were enormous affairs that might have been described as ‘towering’ a generation ago, and they looked as if the same generation had passed since anything much had been done to their peeling stucco. The bank was tucked into the ground floor of one of them, and presented the only trim appearance in the row. Dave slowed down as they came abreast of it, and they took a good look at this first scene of action. Business was going on there as usual; there might be chaos and lurking squads of police within; customers, however, were coming and going with complete unconcern. Averell had been supposing, in his uninstructed manner, that the final assault upon its strong-rooms must have required the use of high explosive, and that there would be shattered windows (a sight familiar on television) all around. He even felt a shade of disappointment that this was not so. It wasn’t a sensible feeling at all.

And now here was the squatters’ house. Dave drew his car to a halt, and leapt out of it in a fashion suggesting the arrival of Action Man in the imagination of a rumbustious small boy. They all jumped out and, as it were, stormed the place. Anybody watching (and what sinister adversary, after all, mightn’t be?) would have felt that something decisively dramatic was in hand. There was, in fact, one visible watcher in the person of a constable stationed on the pavement close to the front-door steps. The constable made no movement; he did, indeed, cast an eye on these arrivals, but it was with an air of indifference which, if tempered by anything at all, was tempered only by a mildly benevolent regard. The front door was ajar. They marched in.

There was a big shabby hall, floored with cracked tiles which had once been designed to simulate the splendours of marble paving in a bold and obscurely Pompeian design. It was unfurnished except for an abandoned receptacle in chipped porcelain which took the grotesque form of the severed leg of an out-size elephant. Incongruously, there were a couple of quite spruce umbrellas located in this, together with a short thick stick, bulbous at the end, which Averell thought of as a knobkerrie, and which might certainly have been accepted as an offensive weapon if produced before a magistrate. But, if Tim and his friends were right, squatters were invariably wholly inoffensive persons. Perhaps this object had been left around by some former tenant with an interest in African antiquities.