The Tiger In the Smoke (22 page)

The news sank in very slowly but it got home at last and the revelation had the paradoxical effect of raising the morale of the whole party while it also dispirited it a little. From his shrouded corner, Geoffrey could see the change in the very silhouettes which pressed round the three who were doing most of the talking. Roly reached the heart of the matter with his next remark.

‘There's only a couple o' lines about Duds and them's on the back. They don't care about Duds no more. They've got the Gaffer to think about. The streets are full of flatties but they ain't looking for us. There was a cop outside the door here when I came by, the ginger B with the big beezer. He gave me good night same as usual. We're almost in the clear. No one's thinking of us.'

‘Three others have been slit up,' said Bill, who read more easily than the rest when he could keep sufficiently still to do so. ‘They're on the front page here. Perhaps the dicks think the Gaffer done Duds as well.'

Tiddy Doll raised his chin sharply. ‘And perhaps they're right,' he said loudly. He had collected himself and his forceful personality came into action once more. ‘So the Gaffer's bin in jail all the time.' There was real bitterness in the observation, regret for a lost illusion. ‘He didn't get no Treasure.'

‘How d'you know? How do you know, Tiddy?' Roly was on the defensive. ‘That's a thing I'd never be too sure of.'

‘No, he didn't get it.' Bill was thoughtful. ‘It says here he done six years of a maximum sentence for robbery with violence. That means he must have got shopped when we thought he deserted, and that was before the Major got his packet and Tom went queer.'

They were digesting this information when the albino took a decision.

‘I say that ain't the Gaffer at all,' he declared, laying a thick finger on the photographs. ‘There's no one but a fool would say they was pictures of a man 'e knew. They might be photos of you, Roly. It ain't 'is name underneath. I reckon it's not he.'

Bill laughed aloud. ‘I'd know it was the Gaffer by what he's done, without the pictures.' The admiration in the words struck a jarring note in the ears of his new leader, and Doll grew scarlet again.

‘I say that's not he,' he repeated fiercely. ‘I say the Gaffer has picked up the Treasure and he's living on it like a lord, and one day we'll come across 'im. As it is, there's this other chap in the paper 'oo must have done poor old Duds in after we left 'im, so the best we can do is to go on like we always 'ave done, taking our money and keeping our eyes open.'

As he finished, the snag in this happy programme occurred to him and he glanced over his shoulder towards the bundle on the bed in the corner. The next idea came to him grudgingly. He did not like it. It frightened him. But it came into his mind and he hinted at it under his breath.

‘There's no telling what a bloke like this 'ere bloke in the papers might do still,' he said.

No one picked him up. At that moment there was a diversion. The prisoner was the first to notice the phenomenon.

From where Geoffrey lay he could see the whole dark arch of the roof, grimy and festooned with cobwebs above the point where the whitewash ended. Now something was happening to the grating through which the newsvendor had thrust the evening paper. The irons, lying snugly in a greasy bed of mud in their stone sockets, had been lifted quietly, and through the dark square a pair of legs had appeared. They were elegant legs in well-pressed wide trousers of a pattern very fashionable in certain circles before the war. Suède shoes and bright socks accompanied them, and above there was the suggestion of tweed, thick, buff, expensive coat skirts.

Directly under the grating, which projected into the alley above, there was a ledge or alcove in the cellar wall. It was thick with the droppings of years, but it provided just enough space for a man to crouch, with the cellar below and in front of him.

Suddenly it was full of colour and smooth movement, and a shower of dust and rubbish floated silently down the white wall.

Everyone in the group round the paper became aware of the intrusion at the same instant. There was a moment of silence, a stunned and timeless pause during which the circle of upturned faces froze into grotesque masks, ludicrous in their astonishment. Then the iron dropped back into place with a thud and the legs kicked out once, as with the grace which belongs to strength alone a man unfolded himself before them. He hung by an arm from the beam in front of the ledge, his feet in their excellent shoes swinging limply two or three yards from the ground. The light fell on him squarely. It found his gay scarf, and the gap of good shirt between his waistcoat and trousers top where his stomach was arched to take his weight, and every man in the cellar saw the tragic face, the forehead on which the coarse hair grew low, and the steady eyes regarding them so boldly as he looked round for men he knew.

Then he dropped lightly to the ground and a smile split a wide, thin-lipped cat's mouth in which the teeth were regular and beautiful.

‘Dad's back,' he said, and his voice was smooth and careful. Only the shadow flitting like a frown across his forehead, and his pallor, which was paperlike, betrayed his weariness. His spirit danced behind his shallow eyes, mocking everything.

—

THE SILENCE IN
the cellar was absolute. No one breathed. Helpless in his far corner, Geoffrey was aware of the tension, but by no means clear on the true cause of it. He had not seen the paper and had not been able to catch much of Roly's story. He lifted his head painfully in an effort to see between the men surrounding the newcomer, but he was careful to make no sound.

Inside the circle the stranger was dusting himself down. It was a performance in which he was very much aware of his audience, and yet it was singularly without flourish. All his movements were smooth and economic, but graceful and exciting to see.

He took his time and let them look at him, well aware that he was worth seeing. He was just under the six feet, with long bones and sloping shoulders, most of his phenomenal strength in his neck and in the thigh muscles which moved visibly under his sleek pre-war clothes. His beauty, and he possessed a great deal, lay in his hands and face and in the narrow neatness of his feet.

His hands were like a conjurer's, large, masculine, and shapely, the fingers longer than the palms, and the bones very apparent under the thin skin.

His face was remarkable. In feature it was excellent, conventionally handsome and full of drawing, the nose straight and short, the upper lip short also and deeply grooved, the chin round and cleft. His eyes were too full and too flat, but they were a deep bright blue, with very long thick lashes. As much as could be seen of the brown hair under his black beret betrayed an obstinate curl despite the prison cut, and jail pallor, which of all complexions is the most hideous, could not destroy the fineness of his skin.

He was a man who must have been a pretty boy, yet his face could never have been pleasant to look at. Its ruin lay in something quite peculiar, not in an expression only but something integral to the very structure. The man looked like a design for tragedy. Grief and torture and the furies were all there naked, and the eye was repelled even while it was violently attracted. He looked exactly what he was, unsafe. Just now he was very tired and prison had left its mark on him. His clothes had been made for him by a tailor of flamboyant temperament some time in the early thirties, but they were now too loose and there were little scurfy patches on his forehead where the hair-line ended.

But he had not lost his grip. Personal magnetism remained glowing in him, as it did in Luke.

He waited for the precise moment when their first shock came to an end and, just as it arrived, nodded casually to the three he recognized.

‘Hallo, Roly; hallo, Bill; hallo, Tom. Mind if I take a pew?'

He dropped on to the box at the head of the table where Doll usually sat and, with a grin at the dwarf, took a chipped potato from the little man's sheet of paper and ate it.

‘Duds been in yet?' The inquiry was casual. At any rate he did not wait for an answer but stretched out his long fingers for another potato, laughing when the dwarf, his tongue lolling, shovelled a whole handful towards him nervously.

But to his hearers the words had a superstitious horror. Duds had never seemed so dead. With a warning glance at Roly, Tiddy Doll began to edge backwards towards Geoffrey, while the ex-fisherman burst into nervous disclaimers.

‘No, 'e ain't. Duds don't come 'ere, Gaffer. Duds 'as never been 'ere in his life.'

‘Hasn't he?' Havoc was eating more quickly now, not with any show of eagerness but steadily, shooting out his hand for one grease-sodden strip after another. ‘I didn't know that. He let me have all the gen on you, of course. That's how I knew where to look you up, actually. Quite a reasonable joint you've got here.'

He had an artificial accent, rather more successful than most of the refinements of Cockney, the words very carefully if not always correctly enunciated, and spoken as if he were listening to them with pleasure.

‘I've not seen him yet.' He paused and his mouth split into a smile of sudden and frightening frankness. ‘I've been on the bash.'

The step behind him was light but he turned so quickly that they all scattered, and Bill, who had been sidling towards him, squealed as he sprang back.

Havoc laughed in his face. ‘Bill, you damned old iron, don't do that,' he said. ‘I've been under a doctor for my nerves for so long I've begun to believe in them myself. You don't know.'

‘But we do know, Gaffer. That's what I'm trying to tell you. We do know. We were all reading this when you came in.'

Bill laid the limp wreck of the morning paper on the table, his ragged cuff shaking like a fringe round his dirty slender wrist. The sight of it already in their hands was a shock to the newcomer. They realized it at once, but not because he betrayed it. His magnetism faltered for a moment, like a current switched off and on. That was all.

A moment later he had bent forward to take a handful of potatoes from the main parcel and had dropped them on the headlines contemptuously.

‘That?' He looked round him. ‘I've been reading that myself. In fact I had a copy in my pocket, a cleaner one, more sanitary. Do you remember old Sanitary? Captain Miller? Anyone run into him? He's back inspecting drains for the Council, I suppose.'

Bill still hovered. He looked as if he were incapable of getting away and yet fidgeting to do so. He made little thrusting gestures just behind the other man's ear.

‘Did you read it all, Gaffer?'

‘All that interested me. Go away, Bill.'

‘Did you read the back page?'

‘No. I used the whole paper for a bit of tidying up. I had something on me that needed cleaning, and when I'd finished I screwed it up and chucked it into the doorway of a police station.'

It was not true. No one believed it, and yet it impressed them, as he knew it would.

‘You ought to have read it, Gaffer, because there's a bit about old Duds on it. He's dead. He's been done in. It says so. Gives 'is real name and everything. ‘Is brother-in-law identified 'im.'

The ragged man brought out the words in a jumble which was only just lucid, and stood swaying on his toes, playing with danger.

‘Duds?' Again there was the same strange sensation of shock and faltering power. It was more marked this time and the man's thick lashes quivered. He pushed the food aside and turned the paper over. When he looked up he startled them. ‘God,' he said, ‘what luck! He did something soft and it caught him, I suppose!' He threw back his head. ‘Now what?'

It was a cry which frightened them. All they understood was that it was a disaster, and if for him then also for themselves. It was all the more terrifying because until then they had not realized that they were no longer regarding him objectively. Already he had taken hold of them, scooped them up and collected them as if they had been a crowd of impressionable girls.

In the far corner, where he had been bending over Geoffrey, Tiddy Doll noticed the reaction and for once he did not bluster.

Until then he had been quietly busy with his piece of adhesive plaster. He always carried this instrument of torture about with him because the dwarf was given to noisy tantrums on occasions and it had been found to be much the easiest way of dealing with him. Doll had become an adept at its swift administration, and even now could always take the little man by surprise. Geoffrey had been neither surprised nor protesting, but a strong self-preservative sense was keeping him quiet while he husbanded all the strength he possessed. He had been in tight corners before, and now had at least the advantage of recognizing one when he met it.

As Tiddy Doll heard the words and the note in them he bent a little lower over the bed. Geoffrey heard him catch his breath and the little sigh he gave when there was no response.

‘When did you lot see Duds last?'

The dangerous question floated across the room and the albino spun round.

‘We seen 'im this afternoon,' he said promptly. ‘He come out of the station in Crumb Street and we followed 'im and meant to speak to 'im, but 'e give us the slip.'

The lie came out glibly from the corner.

‘That's right, ain't it, mates?'

It was the old leader reasserting himself, and they responded at once, relieved at the proffered escape.

‘That's right.'

‘'E give us the slip.'

‘Fog was thick just there.'

‘But we ain't
never
spoken to 'im, Gaffer.' Roly could not help adding the information. ‘We see 'im once in the West End, all togged up, but we ain't
never
spoken to 'im.'