The Tiger In the Smoke (26 page)

‘But we've
been
measured,' she protested. ‘We was done last week. I don't care if you're the Government or the whole bally Lord Mayor's Show, we've
been
measured for the rates. If they go up again I can't pay them. You'd think Hitler had
won
, the way you carry on.'

Her strong voice echoed clearly through the unglazed window and a small man in the queue spat casually into the gutter.

‘Say Russia,' he remarked succintly.

‘This 'ere Jack 'Avoc ain't no Russian,' remarked the fishmonger, half overhearing as he slapped a piece of plaice into the open newspaper which an old woman held out for him. ‘He's home produce, like what this is. Run along Ma, and read all about it by the fire. 'Ave a warm for me.'

In the shop the woman was still grumbling. ‘I'm sick and tired of officials. All over the house they went only last week.'

The taller of her two visitors, a thin mild-looking person who had changed his horn-rims for Health Service issue spectacles for the occasion regarded her anxiously. Mr Campion's position was delicate. He had been forced into making the inquiry without police aid, since he was still half convinced that Levett was engaged on some misguided business of his own. This had involved getting the band's address from some very unofficial quarters, and now that at last he had it it proved to be unspecific. He had understood that the entrance to the cellar was through the back of the shop. He was regretting that he had chosen to introduce himself as a surveyor from the rating authority, but his chief worry was a sudden premonition that urgency was vitally important.

He glanced at his companion and Mr Lugg, impressively immense in mackintosh and bowler, took it for an invitation to assist. He thrust a sheaf of old income-tax forms at the lady.

‘You can't be awkward, not with a dear old lovely face like you've got,' he began with somewhat heavy gallantry. ‘You're goin' to be 'elpful, my dear, that's what you are.'

‘Reelly?' She sounded unconvinced. ‘You leave me face alone. I've 'ad it all me life and I don't want to 'ear about it. Go on, push off. Go and measure next door.'

Mr Campion coughed. ‘It's the cellar, Ma'am,' he began in a confidential tone. ‘Our people made a slip and forgot to enter the measurements of the cellar, so we've had to send down again.'

‘Wasting my taxes! Two of you to measure a cellar. No. I won't give you a key. It's not my place to. My tenants leave their key with me when they go out to work. There it is, hanging on the wall. You touch it and I'll call the cops.' She paused blankly and they all stood looking at a large and naked nail sticking out of the green matchboarding of the wall. ‘It's gorn …' she exclaimed. ‘Who's took it?' And turned on Lugg, bristling with suspicion.

The fat man, taken by surprise, was very hurt.

‘Search me, Missus.'

‘I might if I had the time.' Her bright eyes, small and dark as his own, took in his great bulk with wicked amusement. ‘What are you carrying about with you? The dome of St Paul's?'

‘Ho! Who's talking, eh?' As the insult went home he forgot all caution. ‘Margot Fonteyn of the Covent Garden Ballet, I suppose.'

It was absurd. The purely Cockney quarrel, personal and infantile, flared in an instant. Her woollen bosom swelled, her face grew plum-coloured, and she raised an earth-stained hand to cuff him. Then, restraining herself as something better occurred to her, she leaned out over a pile of gleaming oranges and shouted ‘Police!' at the top of her voice.

To her intense embarrassment a constable heard her. He was immediately outside the shop, his smooth blue back not a yard away. Moreover, he was delighted to attend to her, for while the argument in the shop had been taking place, a second and much more noisy clash had occurred in the queue. It had begun with an unlikely argument on the probability of Jack Havoc turning out to have originated in Eastern Europe, and had blazed into flame when a fuzzy-haired woman with an educated accent and humourless eyes had taken exception to the word ‘Russian' being used as a term of disparagement. She spoke fluently and loudly but not very pertinently, whereupon the fishmonger, affronted at hearing himself described as a ‘futile little bourgeois', an epithet of which he only perfectly comprehended the tone and the initial letters, turned savagely upon her and called her ‘a bloodstained Bolshevik conscientious objector' to her face.

Instantly, as at a signal, everyone within earshot began to air his own strongest views upon the subject nearest to his heart, and the policeman strode over from his corner.

This officer was not a young man. His gingery hair was thinning and he was tired after a long cold night. His mere presence did not quieten the row as it ought to have done, and his warning ‘'Ere, 'ere, 'ere' stood in danger of being ignored.

He was relieved therefore when the cry behind him from enclosed premises made his duty both plain and comparatively peaceful. He turned at once and stepped into the shop.

‘Now then, now then, what's going on here?' His powerful voice reached the queue easily, and the words, promising an interesting diversion, worked the charm which had misfired before. The shouting group round the barrow behaved like a howling child who suddenly perceives a sweet. It ceased its noise abruptly and pressed hopefully after him.

The shopkeeper was overwhelmed by the sudden limelight. Her anger vanished and she became reasonable, if over-anxious to justify herself. Her explanations were voluble but perfectly clear. When she had done, the constable glanced from the officials to the nail.

‘What gives you the idea the key's lost at all?' he inquired placidly. ‘Are they out yet? I've not seen them go by.'

This was altogether too much of an anticlimax. The woman's hand flew to her heart with the easy histrionics of her kind.

‘And it's past nine! Oh, my gord, Officer, that stove! I've warned them time and again. I saw a bit in the paper once. A whole family dead in the morning, suffocated from a coke stove just like that.'

She had the actor's gift, the clear visual image was projected with a minimum of words. Her audience was startled and pleased. Everybody knew the band at least by sight, and the prospect of the whole ramshackle troupe asphyxiated by fumes in a tomb immediately beneath their feet was sufficient to thrill even the most blasé. Even the constable was impressed.

‘Don't say that, Mother, don't,' he protested. ‘Much more likely having a lay-in. I don't blame them on a morning like this.'

Mr Campion saw his chance. ‘All the same,' he said firmly, ‘I think you'd be justified in looking, Officer,' and added, in the confidential whisper of one servant of the State to another. ‘I ought just to run a tape over the place if I could.'

The constable hesitated. It was not a district in which visitors were appreciated and he still had some time to serve in it. On the other hand, his ears had already caught the whisper hissing through the fog behind them.

‘Twenty of them, laid out like sheep. Just like an air-raid. Dial nine-nine-nine.'

‘I can't admit you, you know that,' he muttered to Campion, ‘but if you was to follow me I don't suppose I should stop you.'

He turned on his heel and they went after him, the crowd making room for them at first and then streaming behind.

Down in the cellar Tiddy Doll had just thrust back his box and clattered to his feet. Havoc was leaning towards him, his strange eyes dark with eagerness as he waited to hear of some new coincidence which would lend proof to his terrifying philosophy.

‘Have you? Have you heard the name before?'

Doll was speechless but his mind was working. The staggering success of his plan was overwhelming. The awkward witness behind him was as good as dead already. But there was one little difficulty to be overcome first. If the Gaffer should decide to talk to Geoffrey Levett before he settled him, and he very well might in the circumstances, the dangerous subject of Duds was certain to arise. He glanced nervously at the other two and saw to his relief that the name had not registered on them; although they had heard it recently, it had not made any impression.

He was still standing there, hesitating, feeling round for the safest lie, when the street door gave easily under the constable's pressure and the passage became a sounding board for thundering feet as the crowd streamed into it. At the same time, the second door at the top of the stairs swung slowly open before the inrush of air, and every man in the cellar save one sprang to his feet and stared upward.

A policeman in uniform, two officials in regulation raincoats, and a crowd of chattering, jostling members of the general public, stood swaying at the top of the steps. They made no attempt to descend, but simply stood there looking down.

In the first frozen second Tiddy Doll felt his arms gripped from behind by hands whose strength was a revelation to him. He was moved bodily as if he had no weight, and was set squarely between Havoc and the newcomers. He was being used as a shield and would be treated as ruthlessly as if he were nothing more. The discovery steadied him as nothing else would have done, and he kept his head and rose to the occasion.

‘'Ullo?' His voice rang out, clear and belligerent. ‘What d'you want? We're all at 'ome.'

He might have succeeded, got clean away with it. The constable was already muttering apology, but the band was not made of their leader's metal. As the first moment of stupefaction passed, the line across the farther wall began to heave and waver. The dwarf emitted one of his hysterical tirades and the whole feckless rabble surged forward into the body of the room like a crumbling barricade.

The constable, who was bewildered by the commotion, turned back again. Havoc loosed his hold. He was looking towards the grating high up in the far ceiling. As a jump it was impossible, even for a tiger, and the panic of the man reached Doll like a wave of icy air behind him. The albino began to roar at his people, forcing his authority upon them as he had done a thousand times before. His voice was like a sergeant-major's and the brutal strength of his personality tremendous.

‘Form up! Line up, can't yer? Because you've overslept there's no need to panic. The grub will still be there. Got your moosic? I can't wait all morning. Look alive.'

The dwarf scuttered past him, shouting shrilly in his excitement. Doll thrust out an arm and, catching the little man by the back of his clothes, lifted him boldly from the ground and thrust him behind him to Havoc.

‘'Ere, you carry 'im acrost your shoulders, mate,' he said at the top of his voice. ‘We'll lose 'im in the smoke if 'e runs be'ind.'

The long hands seized him and with a final yelp the little man subsided as he was swung up into his favourite position high above the heads of his persecutors. Doll could have offered his leader no better disguise, for naturally all eyes turned on the mannikin rather than on his steed.

Meanwhile the man with the cymbals was already on the stairs and Doll strode forward and looked up, his dark glasses peering blankly at the intruders.

‘We're just goin' out to have a bit o' breakfast,' he announced. ‘Any objections?'

The constable, who had only remained so long because the pressure of the crowd behind him had made retreat impossible, waved him up without attempting an explanation, and concentrated on clearing a gangway. His helmeted figure retreated slowly and his voice came back to them hollowly.

‘Outside, please! You are on enclosed premises. Outside! Hurry along there, hurry along.'

Only the men in the raincoats did not retreat and presently the thinner of the two put a foot on the first step down. Doll did not like the look of him at all and addressed him from the ground, mistrusting his silence profoundly.

‘We're coming up if you
don't
mind,' he shouted warningly. He hoped to get rid of him and to retain possession of the cellar, but once again his own people frustrated him. At his words, the stream pressed round and past him up the stairs. ‘What d'you want?' he shouted again, and Campion was forced to look at him. As his glance left the line the dwarf, his head towering above the rest and his little hands clutching the lower part of the face of the man who carried him, swept by among the others and out into the passage. Doll came hurrying up last of all. This was disaster, and he alone seemed aware of it. He had no time to listen to the intruders. At the first word when he discovered that they were not plain-clothes men, his interest in them vanished abruptly. The Gaffer was too far ahead as it was. He could just see the dwarf silhouetted against a murky square of light which was the open doorway to the street. If he lost him now he lost him for ever, and everything else besides.

He thrust past Lugg savagely. ‘I can't 'elp you,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Can't 'elp you at all,' and he sped out into the fog after the band.

Mr Lugg recovered his balance with difficulty and turned to his companion, his small black eyes as wide open as nature would permit.

‘Blimey!' he said. ‘What d'you know about that?'

‘Not enough.' Campion was already descending the stairs. ‘I don't care for it at all, do you?'

Lugg caught up with him as he reached the ground. Then they stood gazing round the tousled room where the dying stove stood open and the yellow light still burned. Its habitual neatness was still noticeable under the present disorder, and a carbolic-flavoured cleanliness struck them both. Lugg pushed his hard hat on to the back of his head.

‘Mr Levett wasn't with 'em, cock,' he said, keeping his voice down for no specific reason. ‘I took a good decko at each one as they passed. What a circus, eh? Musical menagerie and no error.'

‘Did you see the man who carried the dwarf?'

‘Bloke in a beret? No, not really, but it wasn't 'im. Too tall. What's the big idea?'