The Ballad of Peckham Rye (16 page)

He handed over her glass of wine. He looked at the label on the bottle. He sat down and
took his shoes off. He put on his slippers. He looked at his watch. Merle switched on
the television. Neither looked at it. ‘I’ve been greatly taken in by that
Scotch fellow. He’s in the pay of the police
and
of the board of Meadows
Meade. He’s been watching me for close on three months and putting in his
reports.’

‘No, you’re wrong there,’ Merle said.

‘And you’ve been in with him this last month.’ He pointed his finger at
her throat, nearly touching it.

‘You’re wrong there. I’ve only been typing out some stories for
him.’

‘What stories?’

‘About Peckham in the old days. It’s about some old lady he knows.
You’ve got no damn right to accuse me and send that big tough round here
threatening me.’

‘Trevor Lomas,’ Mr Druce said, ‘is in my pay. You’ll do what
Trevor suggests. We’re going to run that Dougal Douglas, so-called, out of Peckham
with something to remember us by.’

‘I thought you were going to emigrate.’

‘I am.’

‘When?’

‘When it suits me.’

He crossed his legs and attended to the television.

‘I don’t feel like any supper tonight,’ she said.

‘Well, I do.’

She went into the kitchen and made a clatter. She came back crying. ‘I’ve had
a rotten life of it.’

‘Not since Dougal Douglas, so-called, joined the firm, from what I hear.’

‘He’s only a friend. You don’t understand him.’

Mr Druce breathed in deeply and looked up at the lampshade as if calling it to
witness.

‘You can have a chop with some potatoes and peas,’ she said. ‘I
don’t want any.’

She sat down and took up her knitting, weeping upon it.

He leaned forward and tickled her neck. She drew away. He pinched the skin of her long
neck, and she screamed.

‘Sh-sh-sh,’ he said, and stroked her neck.

He went to pour himself some more whisky. He turned and looked at her. ‘What have
you been up to with Dougal Douglas, so-called?’ he said.

‘Nothing. He’s just a friend. A bit of company for me.’

The corkscrew lay on the sideboard. He lifted an end, let it drop, lifted it, let it
drop.

‘I’d better turn the chop,’ she said and went into the kitchen.

He followed her. ‘You gave him information about me,’ he said.

‘No, I’ve told you —’

‘And you typed his reports to the Board.’

She pushed past him, weeping noisily, to find her handkerchief on the chair.

‘What else was between you and him?’ he said, raising his voice above the
roar of the television.

He came towards her with the corkscrew and stabbed it into her long neck nine times, and
killed her. Then he took his hat and went home to his wife.

‘Doug dear,’ said Miss Maria Cheeseman.

‘I’m in a state,’ Dougal said, ‘so could you ring off?’

‘Doug, I just wanted to say. You’ve re-written my early years so beautifully.
Those new Peckham stories are absolutely sweet. I’m sure you feel, as I feel, that
the extra effort was quite worth it. And now the whole book’s perfect, and
I’m thrilled.’

‘Thanks,’ said Dougal. ‘I doubt if the new bits were worth all the
trouble, but —’

‘Doug, come over and see me this afternoon.’

‘Sorry, Cheese, I’m in a state. I’m packing. I’m leaving
here.’

‘Doug, I’ve got a little gift for you. Just an appreciation
—’

‘I’ll ring you back,’ Dougal said. ‘I’ve just remembered
I’ve left some milk on the stove.’

‘You’ll let me have your new address, won’t you?’

Dougal went into the kitchen. Miss Frierne was seated at the table, but she had slipped
down in her chair. She seemed to be asleep. One side of her face was askew. Her eyelid
fluttered.

Dougal looked round for the gin bottle to measure the extent of Miss Frierne’s
collapse. But there was no gin bottle, no bottle at all, no used glass. He took another
look at Miss Frierne. Her eyelid fluttered and her lower lip moved on one side of her
mouth.

Dougal telephoned to the police to send a doctor. Then he went upstairs and fetched down
his luggage comprising his zipper-case, his shiny new brief-case, and his typewriter.
The doctor arrived presently and went in to Miss Frierne. ‘A stroke,’ he
said.

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Dougal said.

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No, a tenant. I’m leaving.’

‘Right away?’

‘Yes,’ Dougal said. ‘I was leaving in any case, but I’ve got a
definite flaw where illness is concerned.’

‘Has she got any relatives?’

‘No.’

‘I’d better ring the ambulance,’ the doctor said. ‘She’s
pretty far gone.’

Dougal walked with his luggage up Rye Lane. In the distance he saw a crowd outside the
police-station yard. He joined it, and pressed through with his bags into the yard.

‘Going away?’ said one of the policemen.

‘I’m leaving the district. I thought, from the crowd, there might be some new
find in the tunnel.’

The policeman nodded towards the crowd. ‘We’ve just arrested a man in
connexion with the murder.’

‘Druce,’ Dougal said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Druce is the man,’ Dougal said.

‘He’s the chap all right. She might have been left there for days if it
hadn’t been for the food burning on the gas. The neighbours thought there was a
fire and broke in. The tunnel’s open now, as you see; the steps are in. Official
opening on Wednesday. Lights are being fixed now.’

‘Pity I won’t be here. I should have liked to go along the tunnel.’

‘Go down if you like. It’s only six hundred yards. Brings you out at Gordon
Road. One of our men is on guard at that point. He’ll know you. Pity not to see it
as you’ve taken so much interest.’

‘I’ll come,’ Dougal said.

‘I can’t take you,’ the policeman said. ‘But I’ll get you a
torch. It’s just a straight run. All the coins and the old bronze have been taken
away, so there’s nothing there except some bones we haven’t cleared away as
yet. But you can say you’ve been through.’

He went to fetch the torch. A young apprentice electrician emerged from the tunnel with
two empty tea-mugs in his hand and went out through the crowd to a café across
the road.

The policeman came back with a small torch. ‘Give this to the constable at the
other end. Save you trouble of bringing it back. Well, good-bye. Glad to know you.
I’ve got to go on duty now.’

This tunnel had been newly supported in its eight-foot height by wooden props, between
which Dougal wound his way. This tunnel — which in a few days’ time was to
be opened to the public, and in yet a few days more closed down owing to three scandals
ensuing from its being frequented by the Secondary Modern Mixed School — was
strewn with new gravel, trodden only, so far, by the workmen, and by Dougal as he
proceeded with his bags.

About half-way through the tunnel Dougal put his bags down and started to pick up some
bones which were piled in a crevice ready to be taken away before the official opening.
Then he held the torch between his teeth and juggled with some carefully chosen shin
bones which were clotted with earth. He managed six at a time, throwing and catching,
never missing, so that the earth fell away from them and scattered.

He picked up his bags and continued through the hot tunnel which smelt of its new
disinfectant. He saw a strong lamp ahead and the figure of the electrician on a ladder
cutting some wire in the wall.

The electrician turned. ‘You been quick, Bobby,’ he said.

Dougal switched out his torch and set down his bags on the gritty floor of the tunnel. He
saw the electrician descend from the ladder with his knife and turn the big lamp towards
him.

‘Trevor Lomas, watch out for the old bones, they’re haunted,’ Dougal
said. He chucked what was once a hip at Trevor’s head. Then with his left hand he
grabbed the wrist that held the knife. Trevor kicked. Dougal employed that speciality of
his with his right hand, clutching Trevor’s throat back-handedly with his
claw-like grip. Trevor went backward and stumbled over the bags, dropping the knife.
Dougal picked it up, grabbed the bags, and fled.

Near the end of the tunnel, where the light from the big lamp barely reached, Trevor
caught up with him and delivered to Dougal a stab in the eye with a bone. Whereupon
Dougal flashed his torch in Trevor’s face and leapt at him with his high shoulder
raised and elbow sticking out. He applied once more his deformed speciality. Holding
Trevor’s throat with this right-hand twist, he fetched him a left-hand blow on the
corner of the jaw. Trevor sat down. Dougal picked up his bags, pointing his torch to the
ground, and emerged from the tunnel at Gordon Road. There he reported to the policeman
on duty that the electrician was sitting in a dazed condition among the old nuns’
bones, having been overcome by the heat. ‘I can’t stop to assist you,’
Dougal said, ‘for, as you see, I have to catch a train. Would you mind returning
this torch with my thanks to the police station?’

‘You hurt yourself?’ the policeman said, looking at Dougal’s eye.

‘I bumped into something in the dark,’ Dougal said. ‘But it’s
only a bruise. Pity the lights weren’t up.’

He went into the Merry Widow for a drink. Then he took his bags up to Peckham High
Street, got into a taxi, and was driven across the river, where he entered a
chemist’s shop and got a dressing put on his wounded eye.

‘I’m glad he’s cleared off,’ Dixie said to her mother.
‘Humphrey’s not glad but I’m glad. Now he won’t be coming to the
wedding. You never know what he might have done. He might have gone mad among the guests
showing the bumps on his head. He might have made a speech. He might have jumped and
done something rude. I didn’t like him. Our Leslie didn’t like him. Humphrey
liked him. He was bad for Humphrey. Mr Druce liked him and look what Mr Druce has come
to. Poor Miss Coverdale liked him. Trevor didn’t like him. But I’m not
worried now. I’ve got this bad cold, though.’

T
HERE
was Dixie
come up to the altar with her wide flouncy dress and her nose, a little red from her
cold, tilted up towards the minister.

‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?’

‘No, to be quite frank,’ Humphrey said, ‘I won’t.’

Dougal never read of it in the newspapers. He was away off to Africa with the intention
of selling tape-recorders to all the witch doctors. ‘No medicine man,’
Dougal said, ‘these days can afford to be without a portable tape-recorder.
Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth
of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting
influence of modern scepticism.’

Much could be told of Dougal’s subsequent life. He returned from Africa and became
a novice in a Franciscan monastery. Before he was asked to leave, the Prior had endured
a nervous breakdown and several of the monks had broken their vows of obedience in
actuality, and their other vows by desire; Dougal pleaded his powers as an exorcist in
vain. Thereafter, for economy’s sake, he gathered together the scrap ends of his
profligate experience — for he was a frugal man at heart — and turned them
into a lot of cockeyed books, and went far in the world. He never married.

The night after Humphrey arrived alone at the honeymoon hotel at Folkestone, Arthur Crewe
walked into the bar.

‘The girl’s heart-broken,’ he said to Humphrey.

‘Better soon than late,’ Humphrey said. ‘Tell her I’m coming
back.’

‘She’s blaming Dougal Douglas. Is he here with you?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice it,’ Humphrey said.

‘I haven’t come here to blame you. I reckon there must be some reason behind
it. But it’s hard on the girl, in her wedding dress. My Leslie’s been put on
probation for robbing a till.’

Some said Humphrey came back and married the girl in the end. Some said, no, he married
another girl. Others said, it was like this, Dixie died of a broken heart and he never
looked at another girl again. Some thought he had returned, and she had slammed the door
in his face and called him a dirty swine, which he was. One or two recalled there had
been a fight between Humphrey and Trevor Lomas. But at all events everyone remembered
how a man had answered ‘No’ at his wedding.

In fact they got married two months later, and although few guests were invited, quite a
lot of people came to the church to see if Humphrey would do it again.

Humphrey drove off with Dixie. She said, ‘I feel as if I’ve been twenty years
married instead of two hours.’

He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and,
as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming
home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of
green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another
world than this.

ALSO BY MURIEL SPARK

The Abbess of Crewe

The Comforters

The Driver’s Seat

The Girls of Slender Means

Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories

The Public Image