The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (6 page)

"Now
there's
another lovely
piece of goods," he said, turning the ring over in his fingers.
"That's eighteenth century, if I'm not mistaken, from the reign of King
George the Third."

"You're right," I said, impressed. "You're absolutely
right."

He put the ring on the leather tray with the other items.

"So you're a pickpocket," I said.

"I don't like that word," he answered. "It's a coarse and vulgar
word.
Pickpockets is
coarse and vulgar people who only
do easy little amateur jobs. They lift money from blind old ladies."

"What do you call yourself, then?"

"Me? I'm a
fingersmith
. I'm a professional
finger-smith." He spoke the words solemnly and proudly, as though he were
telling me he was the President of the Royal College of Surgeons or the
Archbishop of Canterbury.

"I've never heard that word before," I said. "Did you invent
it?"

"Of course I didn't invent it," he replied. "It's the name given
to them who's risen to the very top of the profession. You've '
eard
of a goldsmith and a silversmith, for instance.
They're experts with gold and silver. I'm an expert with my fingers, so I'm a
fingersmith
."

"It must be an interesting job."

"It's a
marvellous
job," he answered.
"It's lovely."

"And that's why you go to the races?"

"
Race meetings is
easy meat," he said.
"You just stand around after the race,
watchin
'
for the lucky ones to queue up and draw their money. And when you see someone
collectin
' a big bundle of notes, you simply follows after
'
im
and '
elps
yourself. But
don't get me wrong,
guv'nor
. I never
takes
nothin
' from a loser. Nor
from poor people neither. I only go after them as can afford it, the winners
and the rich."

"That's very thoughtful of you," I said. "How often do you get
caught?"

"Caught?" he cried, disgusted.
"
Me
get caught! It's only pickpockets get caught.
Fingersmiths
never.
Listen, I could take the false teeth out of your mouth if I
wanted to and you wouldn't even catch me!"

"I don't have false teeth," I said.

"I know you don't," he answered. "Otherwise I'd '
ave
'ad '
em
out long ago!"

I believed him. Those long slim fingers of his seemed able to do anything.

We drove on for a while without talking.

"That policeman's going to check up on you pretty thoroughly," I
said. "Doesn't that worry you a bit?"

"Nobody's
checkin
' up on me," he said.

"Of course they are. He's got your name and address written down most
carefully in his black book."

The man gave me another of his sly, ratty little smiles. "Ah," he
said.
"So '
ee
'as.
But
I'll bet '
ee
ain't
got it
all written down in 'is memory as well. I've never known a copper yet with a
decent memory. Some of '
em
can't even remember their
own names."

"What's memory got to do with it?" I asked. "It's written down
in his book, isn't it?"

"Yes,
guv'nor
, it is. But the trouble is, '
ee's
lost the book. '
Ee's
lost
both books
, the one with my name in it
and
the one with yours."

In the long delicate fingers of his right hand, the man was holding up in
triumph the two books he had taken from the policeman's pockets. "Easiest
job I ever done," he announced proudly.

I nearly swerved the car into a milk-truck, I was so excited.

"That copper's got
nothin
' on either of us
now," he said.

"You're a genius!" I cried.

" '
Ee's
got no names,
no addresses, no car number, no
nothin
," he
said.

"You're brilliant!"

"I think you'd better pull in off this main road as soon as
possible," he said. "Then we'd better build a little bonfire and burn
these books."

"You're a fantastic fellow," I exclaimed.

"Thank you,
guv'nor
," he said. "It's
always nice to be appreciated."

In 1946.
more
than thirty
years ago, I was still unmarried and living with my mother. I was making a fair
income by writing two short stories a year. Each of them took four months to
complete, and fortunately there were people both at home and abroad who were
willing to buy them.

One morning in April of that year.
I read in the
newspaper about a remarkable find of Roman silver. It had been discovered four
years before by a ploughman near
Mildenhall
, in the
county of Suffolk, but the discovery had for some reason been kept secret until
then. The newspaper article said it was the greatest treasure ever found in the
British Isles, and it had now been acquired by the British Museum. The name of
the ploughman was given as Gordon Butcher.

True stories about the finding of really big treasure send shivers of
electricity all the way down my legs to the soles of my feet. The moment I read
the story, I leapt up from my chair without finishing my breakfast and shouted
good-bye to my mother and rushed out to my car. The car was a nine-year-old
Wolseley
, and I called it "The Hard Black
Slinker
". It went well but not very fast.

Mildenhall
was about a hundred and twenty miles from
my home, a tricky cross-country trip along twisty toads and country lanes. I
got there at lunchtime, and by asking at the local police station, I found the
small house where Gordon Butcher lived with his family. He was at home having
his lunch when I knocked on his door.

I asked him if he would mind talking to me about how he found the treasure.

"No, thank you," he said. "I've had enough of reporters. I don't
want to see another reporter for the rest of my life."

"I'm not a reporter," I told him. "I'm a short-story writer and
I sell my work to magazines. They pay good money." I went on to say that
if he would tell me exactly how he found the treasure then I would write a
truthful story about it. And if I was lucky enough to sell it, I would split
the money equally with him.

In the end, he agreed to talk to me. We sat for several hours in his kitchen,
and he told me an enthralling story. When he had finished, I paid a visit to
the other man in the affair, an older fellow called Ford. Ford wouldn't talk to
me and closed the door in my face. But by then I had my story and I set out for
home.

The next morning, I went up to the British Museum in London to see the treasure
that Gordon Butcher had found. It was fabulous. I got the shivers all over
again just from looking at it.

I wrote the story as truthfully as I possibly could and sent it off to America.
It was bought by a magazine called the
Saturday
Evening Post
, and I was well paid. When the money arrived, I sent exactly
half of it to Gordon Butcher in
Mildenhall
.

One week later, I received a letter from
Mr
Butcher
written upon what must have been a page torn from a child's school
exercise-book. It said, ". .
.you
could have
knocked me over with a feather when I saw your
cheque
.
It was lovely. I want to thank you. . ."

Here is the story almost exactly as it was written thirty years ago. I've
changed it very little. I've simply toned down some of the more flowery
passages and taken out a number of superfluous adjectives and unnecessary
sentences.

Around seven o'clock in the morning, Gordon Butcher got out of bed and switched
on the light. He walked barefoot to the window and drew back the curtains and
looked out.

This was January and it was still dark, but he could tell there hadn't been any
snow in the night.

"That wind," he said aloud to his wife. "Just listen to that
wind."

His wife was out of bed now, standing beside him near the window, and the two
of them were silent, listening to the swish of the icy wind as it came sweeping
in over the fens.

"It's a nor'-
easter
,"
he said.

"There'll be snow for certain before nightfall," she told him.
"And plenty of it."

She was dressed before him, and she went into the next room and leaned over the
cot of her six-year-old daughter and gave her a kiss. She called out a good
morning to the two other older
childen
in the third
room,
then
she went downstairs to make breakfast.

At a quarter to eight, Gordon Butcher put on his coat, his cap and his leather
gloves, and walked out of the back door into the bitter early-morning winter
weather. As he moved through the half-daylight over the yard to the shed where
his bicycle stood, the wind was like a knife on his cheek. He wheeled out the
bike and mounted and began to ride down the middle of the narrow road, right
into the face of the gale.

Gordon Butcher was thirty-eight. He was not an ordinary farm
labourer
. He took orders from no man unless he wished. He
owned his own tractor, and with this he ploughed other men's fields and
gathered other men's harvests under contract. His thoughts were only for his
wife, his son,
his
two daughters. His wealth was in
his small brick house, his two cows, his tractor, his skill as a ploughman.

Gordon Butcher's head was very curiously shaped, the back of it protruding like
the sharp end of an enormous egg, and his ears stuck out, and a front tooth was
missing on the left side. But none of this seemed to matter very much when you
met him face to face in the open air. He looked at you with steady blue eyes
that were without any malice or cunning or greed. And the mouth didn't have
those thin lines of bitterness around the edges which one so often sees on men
who work the land and spend their days fighting the weather.

His only eccentricity, to which he would cheerfully admit if you asked him, was
in talking aloud to himself when he was alone. This habit, he said, grew from
the fact that the kind of work he did left him entirely by himself for ten
hours a day, six days a week. "It keeps me company," he said,
"hearing me own voice now and again."

He biked on down the road,
pedalling
hard against the
brutal wind.

"All right," he said, "all right, why don't you blow a bit? Is
that the best you can do?
My goodness me.
I hardly
know you're there this morning!" The wind howled around him and snapped at
his coat and squeezed its way through the pores of the heavy wool, through his
jacket underneath, through his shirt and vest, and it touched his bare skin
with an icy finger-tip.

"Why," he said, "it's lukewarm you are today. You'll have to do
a sight better than that if you're going to make
me
shiver."

And now the darkness was diluting into a pale grey morning light, and Gordon
Butcher could see the cloudy roof of the sky very low above his head and flying
with the wind. Grey-blue the clouds were, flecked here and there with black, a
solid mass from horizon to horizon, the whole thing moving with the wind,
sliding past above his head like a great grey sheet of metal unrolling. All
around him lay the bleak and lonely fen-country of Suffolk, mile upon mile of
it that went on for ever.

He
pedalled
on. He rode through the outskirts of the
little town of
Mildenhall
and headed for the village
of West Row where the man called Ford had his place.

He had left his tractor at Ford's the day before because his next job was to
plough up four and a half acres on
Thistley
Green for
Ford. It was not Ford's land. It is important to remember this, but Ford was
the one who had asked him to do the work.

Actually, a farmer called
Rolfe
owned the four and a
half acres.

Rolfe
had asked Ford to get it ploughed because Ford,
like Gordon Butcher, did
ploughing
jobs for other
men. The difference between Ford and Gordon Butcher was that Ford was somewhat
grander. He was a fairly prosperous small-time agricultural engineer who had a
nice house and a large yard full of sheds filled with farm implements and
machinery. Gordon Butcher had only his one tractor.

On this occasion, however, when
Rolfe
had asked Ford
to plough up his four and a half acres on
Thistley
Green, Ford was too busy to do the work so he hired Gordon Butcher to do it for
him.