A Train of Powder (27 page)

Mr. Tiffen acted as guide, made a statement to a Scotland Yard Inspector, learned who the dead man was and that he had reason to expect a thousand pounds’ reward, and went home feeling deadly tired and nauseated by the thought of the parcel, though believing that a sleep would get him over that. But it did not; and the next night a chill came on him. He shivered and piled on the bedclothes, and his son-in-law brought him his army greatcoat to lay on top of him, and there is real warmth in those army greatcoats, but still Mr. Tiffen shivered so that the bed rattled. In the morning his son-in-law brought him a cup of tea, and he said he did not want it. His son-in-law said, “Go on, try it, Dad, you must have something,” but he only brought it up. He was like that for a week, and all that time he was away from work; it was as if he had a real chill, but it was not that, it was the shock of handling the body. Of course he had brought in bodies before. In the war he had found several RAF men and a couple of German sailors out on the marshes, but that was helping them to Christian burial, you didn’t think anything of it. But this was different. Mr. Tiffen’s brother-in-law agreed that it was different, something apart. He had brought in a suicide, a woman that had drownded herself (they all four used the old form of the past participle), and had thought nothing of it, but he would not have done what Mr. Tiffen did, not for anything. “Come to think of it,” said Mr. Tiffen’s sister, “Have you seen anything in the papers about them burying the body? I haven’t.”

“They ought to lay it at rest,” said Gran.

“Well, I suppose it’s awkward for them having only the one part of it,” said the sister.

“It’d be better if they got the whole of it. I go up all the time to Mum’s room with the binoculars, to look if I can see another parcel coming in, but I never see anything.”

“You never will,” said Mr. Tiffen, “all the rest is at the bottom of the sea. And it is awkward for the family. Nice people, they seemed, too. They were at Bow Street when I went up to give evidence. Mr. Setty’s sister’s husband came right across the room to shake hands and thank me for the trouble I’d taken, very civil.”

Death was a sacred mystery to these people and a loathsome obscenity; but also it had sometimes to be inflicted, and the risk of it suffered, in the way of duty. Gran had brought in cups of fresh hot tea, and for a minute or two we all drank and were silent. My eyes went to two photographs of destroyers on the walls, and Mr. Tiffen’s brother-in-law said, “My ships in the war. We’re all in the Navy here.”

“All in the Navy,” nodded Gran, and sure enough all the bridegrooms in the wedding groups wore naval uniform. So death was not altogether terrible here, for it was part of a familiar and accepted and enjoyed discipline. Indeed, they had subjugated death still further, for though it was solemnly realized, it was also domesticated, a part of household economy, not taken too seriously, carelessly dispensed to the birds and beasts and fishes, along with love.

“It came of being my holiday then that I came on this thing,” grieved Mr. Tiffen, “for, it being my holiday, of course I went down on the marshes and got out in my punt; that’s what I like to do, have a bit of shooting in my punt.”

“He is a proper wonder in his punt,” said his brother-in-law; “nobody can do more with a punt gun than he can.”

“Only time,” said Mr. Tiffen sadly, “that I ever had anything to do with the police before all this fuss and bother was to go to the police station and get a license for my gun. Duck we can get,” he said more happily, “and widgeon. There’s many like widgeon better than duck, it’s richer. It’s a nice kind of sport too. It’s not like other shooting, you know. You don’t wait for the birds to rise. You paddle along, quiet as you can, lying down in the boat, facing forward, till you see a nice lot of birds settled on the water, and you get to the right distance, so that the shot splays out amongst them, and you get the lot.”

“Twenty or thirty he gets at a time,” rejoiced his brother-in-law.

“We take what we want,” said Mr. Tiffen, “and we get rid of the rest easy enough. I don’t even have to send them to market; I just take them home to the village and sell them up and down the street. People are glad to have them to make up the meat ration.”

“He has his fun and makes good money out of it,” said the brother-in-law. Mr. Tiffen’s glasses shone with satisfaction. The times had got him with his back to the wall; they had made him a farm worker when he was a fisherman and a fowler, but he had found the only loophole, he had an exceptional gift, and, in his several ways, he was enjoying exceptional rewards.

We asked him questions about this gun which brought down twenty and thirty birds at a time, and they were foolish questions, since neither of us had ever shot from a punt. We were worried about the kick of such a wonder-working gun, because we thought it must be fired from the shoulder, like other guns. “No, no,” said Mr. Tiffen patiently, “you haven’t got this right. The boat takes the kick, not my shoulder. It isn’t near my shoulder, it’s lying on the floor of the punt. There’s a couple of ropes like a cradle at the back of it like, to take the kick. It’s got no sights, I just look along the barrel, and when I get it fined up on the birds I ship a paddle and pull the hammer-trigger with my hand. But you come out and see for yourselves the way it is.” “Yes, you ought to have a look at that punt and that gun,” said the brother-in-law, “you won’t see better.” “I never saw better,” said Mr. Tiffen. “I don’t know who made them. They belonged to an old man used to live round here. I bought them when he died. I was young myself then. Come and have a look at them. It’s just a step along the sea wall.”

Outside the warm house the air came cold through our clothes to our skins; it was as if we had dropped into a swimming pool, we shivered and said “Brrr,” but liked it. We walked in single file along the top of the sea wall, Mr. Tiffen going first. His feet were very small, and he put them down lightly and firmly as if he were a ballet dancer. Like us, he had come over two miles of drained marsh, and he had explained that we had not overtaken him on the road because he had come by a short cut of his own across the fields. But though we were muddied to the knees there was hardly a speck of dirt on his neat brown boots. We stopped to look over the blue-green mudflats and listen to the cry of the seabirds. It was as if the still air were striped vertically with the pure, thin, ascendant notes. “The teuks those are,” said Mr. Tiffen. “Some call them red shanks.”

Staring out to the sea, which was now just visible as a dark shining line on the horizon, he ran his hand through his hair and said, “An unnoticing man he must have been, a most unnoticing man. This Hume, the man they said had done the murder. You see how it happened that the body was laying about so that I found it? He dropped it from the plane where he saw deep water. That is why I say he must be a most unnoticing man, for they tell me he was round here during the war with the RAF. He should have noticed that all round the coast here there’s places where it’s deep water just twice in the month, when there’s a full moon and a new moon, and all the rest of the time there’s shallow water. When he dropped this parcel here the sea was flooding over the flats; it was near to the top of the sea wall, I grant you that. But the water runs away, after that there’s only a foot or two of water even at high tide; that parcel was bound to lie about on the mud when it was low tide, same as it was doing when I found it. You’d think a man would know more about tides and such than to do a thing like that, wouldn’t you, especially when he’s been in the neighbourhood, like?” The face he turned on us was deeply lined by the strain of acute observation carried on all his life long, of a constant conversion of the knowledge he thus gained into wisdom. But for once he was inquiring into something which would remain for ever unknown to him. It was not for him to understand the peculiar bargain this age had driven with some of his fellow men: teaching them to perform one enormously complicated operation, such as flying a plane, but in exchange taking away their knowledge of certain very simple things, such as the pull of the moon on the sea, and the unlikelihood that a man can kill another man without being found out, or even the nature of murder.

The punt was lying in one of the channels, and we went out to it over the mud, again appreciating how neat Mr. Tiffen was on his feet. If we followed his trail exactly, treading on the tufts of grass where he had trod, we remained dry-shod; if we strayed, we slid on stuff like toothpaste. For a little we hung over the punt and made clucking noises as if it were a baby. It had that mysterious secondary colour, apart from its paint, which very old boats have, and it looked too fragile to carry its gun, which looked like a drainpipe. “Do you ever capsize?” we asked. “Well, I did when I was very young,” said Mr. Tiffen, and laughed as if he remembered a story against himself.

Just then the clouds broke. Circles of amber brightness travelled towards us over the mudflats and broadened out, and we were suddenly in full sunshine, and quite warm. We were surprised, but Mr. Tiffen told us, “It often gets hot like this down here, even in the wintertime; the coastline runs all twisted here, and the way this bay lies the sea wall shelters you from the east wind. Why, it wasn’t long ago, we were right into November, that I came down here and found a great seal sunning himself in that channel over there. The punt was here, and he was over there, sitting up against the bank as if it was his own armchair. I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve never shot a seal and now I’m going to get one,’ and I had my shotgun lying down here at the foot of the wall, and I came back and fetched it, and I was creeping up on him when he looked round at me and started shaking his head. You know, moved it from side to side, the way old people do when they’re just sitting and are comfortable. Like this.” Mr. Tiffen made a movement which brought before the mind’s eye all the seals in zoos and circuses that look like old gentlemen, all the old gentlemen that look like seals. “After that I couldn’t shoot him. I hadn’t the heart to take his life. Not after he’d looked round at me and shook his head that way. I lowered my gun and let him be.” His face deeply creased with smiling tenderness, Mr. Tiffen looked round at his marshes, his sky. “It was a nice day, just like this,” he said.

2

The person accused of the murder of Mr. Setty, Brian Donald Hume, was twenty-nine years old. It was alleged that he had invited Mr. Setty to his flat in Golders Green and stabbed him to death, on the night of October 4, and cut him up into several pieces and packaged them on the afternoon of October 5; and that later that day he had taken some of these packages up in a plane and dropped them in the North Sea off the east coast, and that the next day he had dropped some more. He was a middle-sized young man, with an abundance of black hair, a face much fatter than his body, a mouth like a woman’s, and deep-set dark eyes burning with eagerness. Whatever it might be that was going to happen next, he would greet it eagerly just because it was an event. He had a much greater lust for life than most people who get into the dock. He looked foreign; he might have been a Turk or an Arab.

The first sight of him suggested that he was a spiv. He wore the checked sports jacket, the pullover, the flannel trousers, all chosen to look raffish, which was then the uniform of the spiv, and he had the air of self-conscious impudence which is the spiv’s hallmark. That in itself made it surprising that he was charged with murder. Spivs were then busy dealing on the black market in automobiles and petrol, meat and poultry and sugar, foreign currency and building materials. Though they broke the law in handling these goods, and some of them got involved in warehouse robberies and automobile thefts, most of them would keep: their hands clean of murder. We still get most of our murderers and hang most of those we catch. It would have been surprising if Hume had been one of the spivs who disregarded this reason for caution, for though it was apparent that he wanted to live, it was apparent that he had suffered some head-on collisions with life in which he had come off badly. He was brassy but wistful.

The court was filled by the relatives and friends of Mr. Setty, who were not wistful. Rumour said that they were kin to the two great Shashoua brothers, who had built a flamboyant opulence for themselves in England during the first forty years of this century. They were no fools. Ben was an automobile dealer in the early days when it took real intelligence to find out what makers were worth following. Abraham was in the textile trade and kept going in that legitimate business until the great textile slump of the early twenties. Ben, who was the more picturesque, was in the end deported. This was not because any criminal proceedings were ever brought against him. It was simply felt that England and he were working at cross-purposes. He revelled in litigation; in the last twenty years of his residence in England he brought twenty-four actions in the court, and must have been an ill-used man, for he won fifteen. The other brother, Abraham, went bankrupt for a hundred and fifty thousand pounds and paid his creditors a half-penny in the pound. He greatly enjoyed all the technicalities of the proceedings and ranks as a very great concert bankrupt. At one point he raised his creditors’ spirits by returning to his birthplace in Mesopotamia to realize some property he owned there, spending three years on the task, surely in courts and gardens where fountains plashed, and returned with the proceeds of the sale, which amounted to thirty-five thousand rupees, but presented an expense account for forty thousand rupees. When he had lived fifty fantastic years an automobile ran over him in a country lane; and a year afterwards his widow, Iris Shashoua, gently and ceremoniously killed herself because she could no longer bear to live without her beloved husband.

The relatives of the Shashouas who were in court belonged to a later and less adventurous generation, which never got its names in the papers; but they had kept the Baghdad quality. Mr. Setty’s sister, Mrs. Ouri, was no longer a young woman, and she had wept the flesh loose from the bones on her face; but she had the arched eyebrows and oval face and bland symmetry which Arabian romancers would have ascribed to a girl lying on a mother-of-pearl bed, fanned by a Negro eunuch, behind the latticed windows of a palace. Like most other women in London, New York, and Paris at that date, she wore a black Persian lamb coat and a hat like a coronet; but it might have been the mourning wear prescribed by ancient custom for women of rank in some walled town on the bare rocks above an Asiatic plain. What the men of her rank in that same city wore at such a time seemed to be shown by her cousin, though he was actually wearing a camel’s hair coat; but his skin was amber, his black hair was crimped like the long tresses and beards of the men sculptured on the monuments of dead civilizations, his features were heavy, not coarse or stupid, but weighty, as if his maker had determined to keep him in scale with retinues of elephants, and masonry built massively, as can be done where there is a multitude of slaves.