The Tiger In the Smoke (2 page)

In many ‘Golden Age' detective novels of the 1920s to 1940s, the police are either peripheral, or mere bumblers, saved by the keen brains of an amateur sleuth. Margery Allingham did not buy into that myth but in the first novels featuring Albert Campion, her private detective bore many of the hallmarks of the upper-class twerp who somehow manages to solve crimes the professional cannot fathom. He had something of Bertie Wooster about him, and a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. Campion had a bland face with a goofy expression, wore glasses, spoke in a cut glass accent and had no chin. He managed to look either absent or foolish, while his brain was working overtime to outwit both criminals and police.

But the Campion of
Tiger
has changed into an altogether more serious, thoughtful man. He has the responsibilities of a wife and young son, he is taken seriously by the CID, and helps them not only by use of brain but of brawn – he races about London in an effort to stop Havoc committing yet another murder, he takes a full and active part in an attempted sting at Paddington station, and he is early on the scene when the hiding-place of the street band is discovered and raided. This is a man of courage and determination. He uses a well-trained and clever mind, but he collaborates fully, never going out on a limb against their advice, or making them look incompetent fools while he solves an abstruse puzzle. He is not near enough when his wife, Amanda, almost comes face to face with Jack Havoc, and Campion immediately sends her and their son, Rupert, to the country, on a drive through the fog accompanied by the stalwart Magersfontein Lugg, his old amanuensis. He knows that Havoc is an evil man. He can smell it. He is not foolhardy, only determined, and he understands the risks they all run in their bid to catch the murderer.

In short, we can believe in Campion, we can respect and like him, and he does not irritate us, as he once did, and as Lord Peter Wimsey never really fails to do, for all his charm.

The plot of
The Tiger in the Smoke
is too convoluted to make for easy summing-up, but that scarcely matters, because although it is exciting enough, it is the least of the book, a peg on which to hang a study of evil and of good and to provide an excuse for some marvellous set-pieces. The moment when Jack Havoc coolly opens a small high window and drops down from street level into the cellar, watched in all stages of horror and surprise by the street musicians below, is breathtaking. The description of the empty house through which he creeps at night, looking for a vital piece of paper, while Amanda and her companion hold their breath in terror a few feet away, makes the reader's heart race. But why a man is pretending to be the dead soldier husband of a beautiful young woman, why her fiancé is in the pub close to and minutes before a small-time villain is murdered by Havoc, and what hidden treasure in a remote house on the French coast has to do with it all are at once crucial and irrelevant. If there are one or two plot-inconsistencies, it scarcely matters.

Are there any flaws in this superb thriller? At the beginning, when we are introduced to the young and beautiful war-widow, it feels dated – the women are over-dressed, pearl-wearing cigarette smokers who, in their early twenties, might well be fifty, and some of the cut-glass dialogue, before the shadow of Jack Havoc and the sinister aura surrounding the street band, darken the scene, seems very stilted. The Second World War is still very close to London and its citizens – the novel was written in the early 1950s – its physical aftermath still visible, its sufferings raw. To the 21
^st
century reader, that is all much farther away.

Otherwise, I know of only half a dozen classic crime thrillers which come near the quality of
Tiger,
and few of their authors who write anywhere near as well as Allingham at the top of her game. It survives because it is a very fine book indeed, it survives for many of the same reasons that Dickens survives. And how many crime writers can stand serious comparison with that magnificent genius?

Susan Hill, 2015

In the shady ways of Britain today it is
customary to refer to the Metropolis of
London as the Smoke

—

‘IT MAY BE
only blackmail,' said the man in the taxi hopefully. The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. The sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black, overprinted in grey and lightened by occasional slivers of bright fish colour as a policeman turned in his wet cape.

Already the traffic was at an irritable crawl. By dusk it would be stationary. To the west the Park dripped wretchedly and to the north the great railway terminus slammed and banged and exploded hollowly about its affairs. Between lay winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair.

The fog had crept into the taxi where it crouched panting in a traffic jam. It oozed in ungenially, to smear sooty fingers over the two elegant young people who sat inside. They were keeping apart self-consciously, each stealing occasional glances in the same kind of fear at their clasped hands resting between them on the shabby leather seat.

Geoffrey Levett was in his early thirties. He had a strong-featured uncommunicative face and a solid, powerful body. His brown eyes were intelligent and determined but not expressive, and both his light hair and his sober clothes were well and conventionally cut. There was nothing in the look of him to show the courage of the man, or the passion, or the remarkable if untimely gift he had for making money. Now, when he was undergoing the most gruelling emotional experience of his life, he appeared merely gloomy and embarrassed.

Meg Elginbrodde sat beside him. He was much more in love with her than he had ever believed possible, and every social column in the country had announced that she was about to marry him.

She was twenty-five years and three weeks old, and for the five years since her twentieth birthday she had believed herself a war widow, but during the last three weeks, ever since her engagement had been announced, she had been receiving through the post a series of photographs taken in the city streets. They were all recent snapshots, as various landmarks proved, and in each of them there had appeared among the crowd a figure who either was her late husband, Major Martin Elginbrodde, or a man so like him that he must be called a double. On the back of the latest picture to arrive there had been a roughly printed message.

‘It may be only blackmail,' Geoffrey repeated, his deep voice carefully casual. ‘That's what Campion thinks, isn't it?'

She did not reply at once and he glanced at her sharply, accepting the pain it gave him. She was so lovely. Queen Nefertiti in a Dior ensemble. Her clothes seemed a part of her. Her plum-coloured redingote with its absurd collar arched like a sail emphasized her slenderness. Since it was fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat's. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasizing and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon grey. She had a short fine nose and a wide softly painted mouth, quite unreal, one might have thought, until she spoke. She had a husky voice, also fashionable, but her intonation was alive and ingenuous. Even before one heard the words one realized, albeit with surprise, that she was both honest and not very old.

‘That's what the police think. I don't know about Albert. No one ever knows quite what he thinks. Val certainly doesn't and she's his sister. Amanda may, but then she's married to him.'

‘Didn't Amanda talk of it at all?' He was trying very hard not to be irritable. One of those solid men whose feet seemed to keep by very nature firmly on the ground, he was finding the inexplicable and unconventional unnerving.

Meg moved her head slowly to look at him, and he was aware of her new perfume.

‘I'm afraid neither of us did,' she said. ‘It was rather a beastly meal. Daddy kept trying not to say what was in his mind and she and I behaved like nicely brought up little boys and didn't notice. It's all a bit unbearable, darling.'

‘I know.' He spoke too quickly. ‘The Canon genuinely thinks it's Martin, does he?' and he added ‘Your husband' with a formality which had not existed between them for a year.

She began to speak, hesitated, and laughed uncertainly.

‘Oh dear, that was terrible! I nearly said “Daddy always thinks the worst” and that isn't at all what I meant – either about Daddy or about Martin.'

He made no comment and there was a long and unhappy pause during which the cab leapt forward a foot or so, only to pause and pant again, frustrated. Geoffrey glanced at his watch.

‘There's plenty of time, anyway. Now, you're sure it is three-thirty that you're meeting Campion and this Inspector?'

‘Yes. Albert said we'd meet in that yard place at the top of the station, the one that used to smell of horses. The message just said, “Bath train, three forty-five, November eight” – nothing else.'

‘And that was on the back of the photograph?'

‘Yes.'

‘It wasn't in Martin's handwriting? Just block capitals?'

‘I told you.'

‘You didn't show it to me.'

‘No, darling.'

‘Why?'

She met his glance calmly with her wide stare. ‘Because I didn't want to very much. I showed it to Val because I work for her, and she called up her brother. Albert brought the police into it and they took the photograph, so I couldn't show it to anyone.'

Geoffrey's face was not designed to show exasperation or any other of the more helpless emotions. His eyes were hard as he watched her.

‘Couldn't you tell if it was like him?'

‘Oh, it was
like
him.' She sounded helpless herself. ‘They've all been
like
him, even that first one which we all saw. They've all been like him but they've all been bad photographs. Besides –'

‘What?'

‘I was going to say I've never seen Martin out of uniform. That's not true, of course, but I did only see him for a short time on his two leaves. We were only married five months before he was killed – I mean, if he
was
killed.'

The man looked away from her out into the fog and the scurrying shadows in it.

‘And dear old Canon Avril seriously believes that he's come back to stop you marrying me five years after the War Box cited him “Missing believed killed”?'

‘No,' she protested. ‘Daddy fears it. Daddy always fears that people may turn out unexpectedly to be horrible, or mental, or desperately ill. It's the only negative thing in his whole makeup. It's his bad bit. People only tell Daddy when it really is something frightful. I know how he feels now. He's afraid Martin may be alive and mad.'

Geoffrey swung round slowly and spoke with deliberate cruelty, aimed mainly at himself.

‘And how about you, pretty? What are you hoping?'

She sighed and leaned back, stretching her long slender legs to dig one very high heel into the jute mat. Her eyes were watching his face and they were entirely candid.

‘I knew I'd have to tell you all this, Geoff, so I thought it out.' The drawl was not unsuited to frankness. Each word had its full value. ‘I love you. I really do. As I am now, with these last five years behind me, I am a person who is quite terribly in love with you and will always be – or so I think now, today, in this taxi. But I did love Martin when I was nineteen, and when I knew – I mean when I thought – he was dead I thought I'd die myself.' She paused. ‘Somehow I think I did. Your Meg is a new girl.'

Geoffrey Levett discovered with horror that he was in tears. At any rate his eyes were smarting and he felt sick. His hand closed more tightly over the slender gloved one and he banged it gently up and down on the cushion.

‘I'm a damned fool,' he said. ‘I ought not to have asked you that, my dear, dear girl. Look, we'll get out of this somehow and we'll go through with the whole programme. We'll have everything we planned, the kids and the house and the happiness, even the damned great wedding. It'll be all right, I swear it, Meg. Somehow, it'll be all right.'

‘No.' She had the gentle obstinacy of her kind of woman. ‘I want to tell you, Geoffrey, because I've thought it all out, and I want you to know so that whatever I do, well at least you'll understand. You see, this message may mean just what it looks to mean, and in an hour I may find I'm talking to Martin. I've been thinking how horrible that'll be for
him
. You see, I've
forgotten
him. The only thing I keep remembering and dreading is that I must tell him about the dog.'

‘The dog?' he repeated blankly.

‘Yes. Old Ainsworth. He died soon after Martin was – presumed killed. Martin will hate that. He loved Ainsworth. They used to sit and look at each other for hours and hours. It's horrible, but it really is the clearest thing I remember about either of them. Martin in pyjamas and Ainsworth in his tight brown skin, just sitting and looking at each other and being quite happy.'

She made a small gesture with her free hand. Its arc took in a lost world of air-raids and hurried meals in crowded restaurants, hotels, railway stations, khaki, sunlight – stolen pools of peace in chaos.

‘When he was in the Desert he wrote a poem to Ainsworth. Never to me, you know – but he did write one to Ainsworth.' Her husky voice filled the rain-drenched world. ‘I've never forgotten it. He sent it home, probably
for
Ainsworth. You'd never imagine Martin writing verse. It went:

‘I had a dog, a liver-coloured mongrel

With mild brown eyes and an engaging manner.