Going It Alone (12 page)

Tim had dismissed their hired car before making contact with Dave, and this, although a rational procedure, enhanced Averell’s sense that he had implicated himself with conspiratorial young persons. And Dave himself was perplexing. Averell couldn’t place him at all. His car was a large Bentley – a circumstance which, although it was of mature years, suggested a background of considerable substance. Again, although Dave’s hairstyle and attire suggested what Averell thought of as a hippie (or was it a beatnik?) much more than did anything about Tim and the two girls, he seemed to be basically the sort of young man whose notion of professional activity includes becoming an officer in the Brigade of Guards. This small social enigma was no doubt of very little consequence. Tim and Anne, after all (although not perhaps Lou), were in strict class terms out of the same drawer as this young man – although he might be rich, and Tim at least had some title to call himself poor. A social mix up (in what Averell told himself were his own archaic and hide-bound terms) was clearly judged agreeable and edifying in the coteries with which Tim had involved himself.

They sat round an undersized table, drank an approximation to coffee, and ate the sandwiches which Lou had provided – together with several bags of crisps purchased on the spot. Averell, although not normally self-conscious, saw himself as awkwardly out of the picture. A fat woman at the next table kept staring at him in a wooden way. Almost certainly it was from no more than a kind of inert stupidity. But Averell actually found himself supposing that she was turning him over in her mind.

‘I keep on thinking,’ Dave said, ‘that I know what all this is about. And then it eludes me.’

‘And so do I, Dave.’ Tim seemed instantly to recognize in Dave some mental process akin to his own.

‘But Tim has what you might call the livelier interest,’ Lou said crisply. ‘They tried to murder him in or around the flat twice within an hour. And then they tracked him to Boxes too.’

‘I don’t think –’ Averell began, and then fell silent. If he took up this point at all it would merely confuse matters by introducing something totally irrelevant to the alarming happenings in London. He had already said as much as this to Anne, and he saw no reason to regard it as untrue. (Time was very rapidly to reveal a small factor of error in this. But Averell, being unendowed with any precognitive faculty, was unaware of the fact.)

‘But I believe I have got some way,’ Tim was saying, ‘in sorting the thing out. It’s a matter, for a start, of the character of this takeover of the Uffington Street house. I went there two or three times, you know, on account of the photographs and all that, and it didn’t strike me, somehow, as quite the usual thing.’

‘Nor me,’ Dave said.

‘It wasn’t going to make the public relations side of the job easy. Too few homeless chaps with wives and young kids to give the required key-note. The effect was more of a round-the-clock pop concert really. That’s a very good thing in its way, but there in Uffington Street it was a bit of a racket. Of course people were smoking this and that, and demi-semi-concealing themselves when suddenly feeling affectionate. I did a bit in a candid-camera way, since it seemed to be expected of me.’

‘Tim, how disgusting!’ Anne said sharply.

‘Oh, well – nothing exotic,’ Tim said easily. ‘And it isn’t my point that there was a certain amount of wantoning and chambering. Have you ever been to a hunt ball, Anne – or something of that kind?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘With me,’ Dave said. ‘Perhaps she has never told you, Tim. But Anne and I share a murky past in polite life.’

‘Don’t be silly, Dave.’ Anne was clearly annoyed by this revelation. ‘Tim, go on.’

‘Well, you remember how there is always a photographer who snaps Mr
A
chatting with Lady
B
, and who huddles people into grinning groups all jollied up on caterers’ champagne. I did quite a lot of that one night in Uffington Street. One or another clutch of chums, you know. So you all see what’s in my head.’

‘At any rate, I do,’ Lou said. ‘You believe yourself to have photographed the gang that did the bank robbery – and they woke up to the undesirableness of the fact rather late.’

‘Just that, Lou. What a smart girl you are.’

‘It seems to me wholly improbable,’ Dave said. ‘I grant you that in all that squatting crowd, and with all the coming and going there was, a little gang of professional thieves might lurk. But if they
were
professionals they certainly wouldn’t line up smirking in front of the wonder-boy’s candid lens.’

‘It might depend on the champagne – or whatever was the equivalent of that.’ Averell offered this contribution to the debate considerably to his own surprise. ‘A mood of bravado may have overtaken them. Or they mayn’t even have known at the time what was going on. They may have been alerted to it afterwards.’

‘And decided to take care of the photographer,’ Anne said. ‘I suppose there
are
people as desperately wicked as that.’

‘Oh, most certainly,’ Dave said cheerfully. ‘And there would be big stakes in this affair. Then there’s another thing, and it makes me feel that perhaps Tim’s on the right track, after all. There probably aren’t all that many high-powered gangs able to tunnel their way into vaults and strong rooms. And at least some of them will be known already to the police. So if a crowd like that turned up in photographs taken by our young ace in Uffington Street, the fuzz would know just who they were looking for.’

‘But would it be possible,’ Averell asked, ‘for even three or four men to gate-crash this squat, and be around perhaps for several days, and pass undetected? And it would have to be for several days, if they really had a big burrowing operation on hand. And I don’t quite see how that could have been managed at all.’

‘For a start,’ Tim said, ‘the squat was a gate-crashing operation itself, in a way. And people drifted away from it and others came in: that always happens in these affairs. And not everybody would be known to everybody else, by any means. And it’s really a very big house, with cellars and attics and what have you. No, it all seems quite feasible to me.’

‘What about the racket?’ Lou asked. ‘You can’t bore your way –’

‘Yes, you can.’ Tim was confident. ‘It sounds strange, and it must all be pretty laborious. But it’s certainly possible to excavate long tunnels as quietly as if you were moles yourselves. People did it to escape from prison camps, and they do it today to get into banks and shops and offices. Not a doubt about that. And what made a real row in Uffington Street was all those groups.’

‘Groups?’ Averell said.

‘Small bands, Uncle Gilbert. You might call a string quartet a group. Somebody brought one in, it seems, to brighten things up, and the idea caught on. There were visits from several more – for free, I imagine. One or two hung about for quite a long time.’

‘True enough,’ Dave said. ‘I gave one of them a hand, as a matter of fact. Quite nice chaps, but there were two or three others I know nothing about. I say! Isn’t a group much the same as a gang? There’s our answer, I do believe.’

‘But what about the answer thought up by the fuzz?’ Anne asked. ‘It’s our business to do something about that.’

‘I’ve an idea we ought to be thinking about the fuzz,’ Averell said – and was displeased to hear himself use this presumably derogatory term. What he was now wondering, was whether these young people were inclined a little to discount the intelligence of the forces of the law. ‘I mean,’ he went on cautiously, ‘that their minds may have been moving not altogether differently from our own. They may have seen the probability of professional criminals having mingled successfully with your squatting acquaintances, and may be detaining the whole lot simply in the hope that some process of sifting and identification may reveal the crooks as still lurking in the bag. In fact, I can’t take the notion of a wholesale charge of bank robbery against the lot of them at all seriously.’ Averell was gaining confidence as he spoke. ‘But we can’t really get very far without much more precise information than we seem to have. Have you any notion, Dave, of how the theft was discovered?’

‘Oh, just as such things always are discovered. When the bank people arrived and opened up in the morning.’

‘We seem to know how the robbers entered the bank. But how did they leave it?’

‘By the same route, I imagine. It’s probably not much easier to leave a locked up bank than to enter it. So they’d have retreated down their tunnel with their booty. But this is just what chaps are saying. The fuzz keep mum.’

‘No doubt. And once the thieves were back on the squatters’ ground they could slip away unobserved and more or less at once, even lugging their booty with them?’

‘Well, not exactly staggering under crates of bullion, I suppose. But in a general way, yes. There would always be a lot of free coming and going, and nobody taking much notice. There was me, for instance. I was there overnight, but happened to leave very early in the morning. The police hadn’t a cordon round the place, you know, simply because there were squatters in it. It would be quite illegal to try to prevent people going in and out.’

It didn’t seem to Averell that much of this was very illuminating, and he wondered what plan of action, if any, was forming in his companions’ minds. Their present surroundings he continued to find depressing. It was a long time, for one thing, since he’d eaten potato chips. And, for another, the fat woman was still staring at him. Or perhaps he was imagining this. Perhaps she was staring at each of them in turn. Did they look in any marked degree peculiar or out of the way? He had no idea.

‘I haven’t quite got hold of the timescale,’ Lou was saying, ‘except that we seem to be hearing about it all a bit belatedly. And, just like Gilbert, I come back to all those arrests.’ (Averell was surprised but unoffended at hearing himself thus familiarly referred to.) ‘If the thieves
could
walk out – just as Dave walked out – they
would
walk out. So the arrests were sheer unwarranted harrassment. Somebody should ask a question about them in the House of Commons.’

‘No good coming back to the bees in our own bonnets,’ Tim said a little unexpectedly. ‘The crooks might still have been lurking in the bag, as Uncle Gilbert says, when the police piled in and found the tunnel. I don’t think that a charge that the fuzz had been high-handed would meet with much public sympathy. Particularly as everybody may well have been let go by now. It seems to me that our first job is to get clued up on just that.’

At this moment the fat woman (who was unaccompanied by any male escort) made a move, getting ponderously to her feet and waddling towards an exit. Her route took her past the table occupied by the party from Boxes, and as she came abreast of them she put out a hand and very impudently ruffled Dave’s hair. Or that was the appearance of the thing. Dave, not unnaturally, was displeased. But, although pale with anger, he sat tight and did nothing – which was precisely what one would have expected (Averell reflected) of so evidently well-bred a young man. And it was only when the fat woman had vanished that Anne spoke.

‘She’s left something,’ Anne said. ‘Posted it, you might say.’

At this Dave ran his own hand through his hair, which was certainly sufficiently abundant for what had been the fat woman’s purpose. It came away holding a small twist of paper, which he unrolled, studied briefly, and then handed round his companions. It bore a brief message, scrawled in pencil:

Get lost, Dirtylocks! Nose out, see? Or else…

To this succinct message a roughly sketched skull and crossbones had been appended by way of signature.

‘Well, well! Dave said, with what appeared to be genuine calm. ‘My turn now. And rather like the Black Spot in
Treasure Island
. Who’d suppose an old soul like that to be of a literary inclination? Anne my dear, please rearrange my
coiffure
for me.’

Anne at once performed this service unaffectedly with a pocket comb. Neither she nor any of the others ventured to comment on the unfairness of the fat woman’s derogatory appellation.

‘Now we’ll be moving,’ Tim said briefly.

‘Do we know where to?’ Lou asked.

‘To wherever we can find some of those squatters, for a start.’ Tim was quite clear about this. ‘Even if it’s in quod. We need a lot more in the way of first-hand impressions of what went on. Even Dave was like me – only in on it in a marginal way, it seems.’

‘Let’s think about Dave now,’ Lou said. ‘About what has just happened, I mean. Why should those people add him to their death-list?
He
hasn’t been taking photographs. Or if he has we haven’t been told about it.’

‘Never took a photograph in my life,’ Dave said. ‘It’s a middle-class habit. A bourgeois habit, I mean.’

‘And you
haven’t
exactly been added to a death-list,’ Tim said. ‘They’ve just warned you off. It was me who was on a death-list. But they didn’t tell me so. They just had a couple of goes at me straight away, and I pretty well expect another any minute. It may be said they’ve gone soft on Dave. I wonder why?’

‘Perhaps because he’s so adorable,’ Lou said.

‘Nonsense! I’m adorable too. Anne, aren’t I adorable?’

‘If you are, you’re an idiot as well.’ Anne was finding this gaiety unseasonable. ‘And listen! Unless I’ve got it wrong, there’s one big difference between Tim and Dave. Tim, just when did that letter-bomb thing arrive on you?’

‘First post Monday.’

‘Well, that’s one fact. Dave, what about the break-in at the bank?’

‘Oh, haven’t I made that clear? I thought I told Tim on the blower. Tuesday in the small hours.’

‘Exactly! And there’s the difference between our two heroes. They try to kill Tim just
before
their robbery. And they start threatening Dave a couple of days
after
it. And just threatening. We still don’t know what to make of that.’

‘A branch of the gang,’ Anne said, ‘that believes in milder courses than the lot who had a go at Tim.’