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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Skelton's Casebook
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Guy Fawkes Night, 5th November, 1930. Bonfires are blazing, rockets burst. In a country lane, revellers discover a car that has been set on fire. At first, they assume that this is the work of vandals taking the Guy Fawkes spirit a little too far, sitting at the wheel is a body, charred beyond recognition. The initial assumption is that the owner of the car, Mr Harold Musgrave, a successful travelling salesman has taken his own life in a particularly grisly act of self-immolation. The post-mortem, however, reveals that Mr Musgrave was either unconscious or dead before the fire was lit. When Tommy Prosser, a local criminal, is charged with the murder, barrister Arthur Skelton believes him to be innocent, so sets out to ensure justice is served.
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SKELTON’S GUIDE TO BLAZING CORPSES
David Stafford
In memory of Marc Beeby
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Guy Fawkes’ Night, Wednesday, 5th November 1930
When the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, the news was spread around the country by beacon fires blazing on prominent hilltops. Dunworth Beacon, just outside Great Dunworth, boasted the biggest and brightest of all the fires. That’s what Mr Glazier said, anyway, and because he was Chairman of the Parish Council, and because nobody else had ever bothered to give the matter much thought, it was generally accepted as true.
To commemorate the event, every year on 29th June Mr Glazier lit the fire again, bright enough to be seen from Biggleswade in the east and Clophill in the west. He also lit fires to celebrate the King’s birthday, the birth of a royal baby, 8Empire Day, Trafalgar Day, Christmas, New Year, Easter and the birthday of William Pitt the Elder who, he claimed, spuriously, had some connection with the village.
Mr Glazier liked fires. And he didn’t think any fire was complete without fireworks. He made these himself to his own recipes. They banged more loudly, flew higher and whizzed more fiercely than anything you could buy in the shops.
Guy Fawkes Night, 5th November, was always his greatest triumph. For weeks he would have the lads of the village carrying fissionable materials up the hill, where they would be scientifically arranged with reference to draught, ashfall and pyrolysis. The lads did as they were told because Mr Glazier was such a commanding presence. Some of the younger ones found him terrifying. A head taller than anybody they’d ever seen; he wore spectacles with one lens made of black metal instead of glass and extending down towards his mouth to conceal an empty eye socket and unsightly scarring. His left hand was a hook, which he used with great speed and dexterity, manipulating a log, for instance, then smacking the point of the hook into it to hoist it into the air, shaking it off, catching it and twisting it into its required position.
The injuries had been sustained during the war, in which he had served gleefully in the Royal Engineers, blowing up bridges, buildings, tanks, hills and forests, and generally having a fine old time.
But tonight, Guy Fawkes Night, though the bonfire had been built higher than ever before and though he had 9devised many new fireworks that, he hoped, would be heard in several counties and possibly cause light structural damage to nearby property, a gloom had descended. It was raining. The fire was soaked and there was a grave danger that his rockets and Roman candles would all end up damp squibs.
Nevertheless, at 7.30 he decided for the sake of tradition to brave the weather and light the damn thing anyway – give the villagers something cheery to see out of their windows. So, in sturdy boots, trench coat and sou’wester, a gallon can of petrol in his hand, a second gallon dangling from his hook, he made the ascent of Dunmore Beacon.
He removed some of the outer material so as to gain access to the inside of the fire, where the petrol would be most effective at drying out the whole. It caught with an audible ‘whoosh’. So entranced was he by the movement and growth of the flames that it was several minutes before he noticed that it had stopped raining. The sky was clear, and there were people, with electric torches and hurricane lanterns, braving the mud and coming up the hill. They’d expect a show.
George Sonning was the first to arrive.
‘I didn’t bring the fireworks, George,’ Mr Glazier said. ‘Thought it’d be too wet. I should pop back and get them, I suppose. Tell everybody there will be a short delay, would you?’
Geoffrey Spencer had finished his homework by half past six. His dad had looked it over and criticised him for 10underlining freehand rather than doing it properly with a ruler.
‘Nobody underlines with a ruler. Not even the teachers.’
‘It doesn’t matter what other people do, though, does it? If they want to produce sloppy work, that’s up to them. But at Carter and Royal’s we always use rulers.’ Carter and Royal’s was the insurance company where Dad worked.
It soured the atmosphere in the house already slightly soured by the fact that it was far too wet for any bonfires or fireworks. Mrs Spencer tried to ease the tension, but mostly they ate their baked potatoes and sausages in silence.
After supper, though, Geoffrey saw that the rain had stopped, and Mr Glazier had lit the fire after all.
‘Shall we go up and have a look?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘No, it’ll be muddy.’
Geoffrey watched the blaze from the window.
‘I think I might go up,’ he said. He was nearly sixteen. ‘I’ll put my wellies on.’
Mum looked at Dad, who rolled his eyes. It was up to her.
‘All right, then. But be back by ten. Keep your scarf wrapped round your mouth so you don’t breathe in the smoke. And don’t get too close. You know what happened to Jeremy Fleming.’
Every bonfire night the name of Jeremy Fleming – Three Fingers Fleming – was invoked as a reminder of what happens to those who use Catherine wheels incautiously.
On the corner of Keeper’s Lane, Geoffrey ran into Jeannie Crowson. This was all right. He’d had his eye on Jeannie 11Crowson ever since the cricket match when she’d helped with the teas and said his face looked very brown against the white of his shirt.
Both of them had electric torches, but halfway up Keeper’s Lane, Jeannie’s torch flickered and died, so Geoffrey pretended his had bust, too. Then he made ghost noises and Jeannie pretended she was scared, so he put his arm round her, and she didn’t seem to mind that at all.
Just ahead of them, around a bend in the lane, there was a whooshing sound and a great sheet of flame shot into the sky.
‘Blimey, that’s a big ’un,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What is it? Roman Candle?’
They ran towards it.
‘Somebody’s done their bonfire in the middle of the road,’ Jeannie said. But even before she’d finished speaking they could see it wasn’t a bonfire. Somebody had set a car alight.
‘I bet it’s them kids from Clophill,’ Geoffrey said, trying not to sound scared. He was petrified of the kids from Clophill. Beyond the flames, they could see somebody running away. ‘I wouldn’t get too close if I were you, Jeannie. It might explode or something.’
But in fact, after the initial whoosh, the flames seemed to have died down.
Jeannie screamed. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘There’s somebody in it.’
Geoffrey moved closer. There was a figure, almost unrecognisable as human, behind the wheel. The skin had already blackened. 12
Once, Geoffrey’s dad had burnt a pile of leaves. He didn’t know there were frogs hiding in it. As the frogs burnt, their legs had slowly extended and stiffened. The driver’s arms were doing the same, moving slowly upwards, away from the wheel.
Jeannie, hovering now near the edge of the flames, stuck out an arm to see how close she could get, then pulled it back fast and edged away.
‘We should try and get him out, Geoffrey. He might still be alive.’ This was a stupid thing to say, and she knew it. ‘Or get some water, pull him out with a stick.’
‘We can’t do nothing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’m going up The Bell to get help.’
Rather than trying to get round the car, he climbed over the fence and took a straight line to the pub, stumbling across a ploughed field, with Jeannie following. He tripped and hit his head on something hard but got straight back up and kept running.
The rain started again.
On Stubbs Lane, they could see a group of blokes running towards the pub to get out of the rain. A couple of them had already noticed the light of the flames over the hedgerows.
Geoffrey shouted, ‘There’s a car on fire up Keeper’s and there’s somebody in it.’
A couple of the blokes ran into the pub to raise the alarm. There was confusion among the others because some of them had lights and some of them didn’t, and some went the Stubbs Lane way, and some came over the gate into the field and went that way. 13
Geoffrey bent over, breathing heavily.
Jeannie came up behind him and put her arm around him.
‘You all right?’ she asked.
‘I hurt myself a bit,’ he said.
Jeannie helped him into the pub and sat him down.
‘You’re bleeding on your head,’ she said.
She took her hankie out, spat on it, and dabbed at the blood, then held the hankie tight against the cut to stop the bleeding, keeping the other arm tight round his shoulder.
Geoffrey put both his arms round her waist and held on tight.
They’d seen the face. That was the trouble. It was grinning and there were flames coming out the top of the head.
Monday, 10th November 1930
Arthur Skelton, barrister-at-law, 39-years-old, pebble-glasses, face like a pantomime horse, wing-collar, grey homburg, thick overcoat against the chill, woollen scarf his mum in Leeds had knitted wrapped three times around his neck, gave some thought to the stone pier at the bottom of the steps outside Marylebone Police Court. He knew that sitting on cold stone was supposed to give you piles. Then there was the actual act of sitting down and getting up again to consider. He was six foot three, most of it spidery leg, and had been born with a displaced hip which still gave him trouble.
On the other hand, he needed somewhere to smoke and brood for a few minutes, so, throwing caution to the winds, 16he sat down, filled his pipe and read the advertisements on the passing buses.
Dewar’s Whisky. Aaah, Bisto. Player’s Weights. Daily Graphic for the BEST pictures.
He was fed up.
Usually, winning a case would be cause for at least a bit of a spring in the step and a glow to the complexion, but the morning’s proceedings had left a nasty taste.
On the previous Saturday, Giles Gordon Ewers, 19, a student up at Oxford, having just scored the winning try in a college rugby match, was driving back to London in his AC two-seater. Drink had been taken. Feeling boisterous, he had dangled a walking stick, the sort with a duck’s-head handle, out of the side of the car, in the manner of a polo mallet, and knocked down a lamp and the guard rails around some roadworks.
Two cyclists on a tandem, riding close behind, unable to stop, had collided with the guard rails and overturned. One of them sustained a head injury that left him momentarily unconscious, the other a leg injury, which had required twelve stitches.
Mr Ewers, though clearly aware of the accident, failed to stop and instead accelerated away.
All of this was observed by a motorcyclist who, having ascertained that other passers-by were attending to the injured cyclists, had given chase. Further along the road he stopped a police constable, who had jumped on the pillion. After giving chase for a couple of miles or so, they caught 17up with Mr Ewers, who stopped when ordered to by the constable and allowed himself to be taken into custody. He had spent the rest of the weekend in a police cell.
On the Sunday morning, the boy’s father, General Sir James Ewers, had disturbed the leisurely breakfast being enjoyed by his solicitor, Aubrey Duncan, and insisted he get the best barrister available down to the police court first thing on Monday to make sure the boy was released, ideally with an apology from the police for making such a ‘fuss’ about a ‘boyish prank’.
Since the General, a litigious man, was one of the solicitor’s more lucrative clients, Duncan had disturbed the leisurely lunch of Arthur Skelton. And since Skelton and Duncan had worked together on many cases in the past, and since Skelton’s chambers were practically next door to Duncan’s offices, and since the fee being offered was breathtaking, arrangements were made.
A weekend in police custody usually left people looking seedy and unwashed. Giles Ewers seemed shiny, well-breakfasted and smiling.
‘Lord bless us,’ Ewer said, adopting the fake cockney accent favoured by bright young things, ‘The guvnor’s sent a proper brief. What’s it going to be? Five quid and a wigging from the beak followed by a worse wigging from the guvnor?’
Young people of a certain class, Skelton had come to realise, had too often had their understanding of criminal law guided by the works of Mr P. G. Wodehouse, whose hero, Bertie Wooster, often told tales of having to pay a fiver to 18a magistrate for knocking off a policeman’s helmet on New Year’s Eve, or getting a ‘wigging’ from some dowager aunt for burgling her house.
He glanced at the charge sheet that had been handed to him on his way in. There were several.
‘I’m afraid the first charge alone,’ he said, ‘that of dangerous driving, could attract a two-year sentence.’
The boy smiled, ‘But surely …?’ He leant slightly to one side, as if the thought of prison had literally sent him off balance. ‘You haven’t got a cigarette, have you? I ran out.’ He held up his empty cigarette case and let one of the sides flap down.
‘Pipe man, I’m afraid.’
‘Could you perhaps send one of the chaps out to get some?’
‘Court ushers are not employed to run errands for the accused.’
The boy sat up and sulked.
‘Shall we get on with it?’ Skelton said. ‘Now, first of all I would advise against pleading guilty. Given the nature and number of the charges, the magistrates would have little option other than to send you to prison. You have already admitted to taking drink after the rugby match.’
‘Yes, but, only a couple of pints.’
‘Mild?’
‘Bitter.’
‘And in your experience, after a couple of pints, are you a competent driver?’ 19
‘Sharp as a knife.’
‘But on this occasion, you seem to have driven erratically, not to say recklessly.’
The boy was silent.
‘Do you have a mechanic who takes care of your car?’
‘The guvnor’s chauffeur usually has a look at it when I’m in town.’
‘And is it in generally good condition, brakes, steering, tyres and so on?’
‘He said it was making a bit of a racket, but I said I like it like that.’
‘A problem with the silencer, perhaps?’
‘She’s a rust bucket, but I do love the old dear.’
Skelton remembered a case from a couple of years earlier – not one of his – in which the defence had claimed that the driver appeared to be drunk but was actually suffering from inhalation of fumes, which were escaping into the car from a defective exhaust. There was obviously no time to get expert testimony and mechanical inspections before the trial today, but it might be enough to secure an adjournment. It was something, anyway.
He told the boy how to behave himself in court. Head down, look ashamed, no smiling, speak when you’re spoken to, answer the questions with one-word answers if possible. Then he provided him with pen and paper and dictated a letter he could send to the couple on the tandem, expressing his heartfelt apologies and offering them, by way of compensation, twenty-five pounds to cover repairs to the bicycle and medical 20expenses. This meant that in court, to further demonstrate the boy’s contrition, Skelton could say, without perjuring himself, ‘Mr Ewers has already written to …’
On the way into the court, he saw Charlie Perry, one of the ushers, and stopped for a word.
‘What happened about Fulham?’ Skelton asked. The last time they’d spoken, some weeks earlier, Charlie had told him that his son, Bert, had been invited to try out for the Fulham boys’ team.
‘He’s played, three games,’ Charlie said. ‘Hasn’t exactly shone in any of them but he keeps his end up and they haven’t sacked him yet.’
‘You get down to see him?’
‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away, Mr Skelton,’ Charlie said. ‘You doing the Ewers boy?’
Skelton nodded glumly.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’ve got much to worry about. Mr Mariner served under the General at Cambrai.’ Mariner was the Chairman of the Magistrates.
Skelton sighed. To claim that the link would compromise Mariner’s eligibility to have anything to do with the case was, he knew, pointless. Half a million men served under General Ewers at Cambrai. The fact that Mariner – a senior officer, no doubt – would most likely have messed with him, passed him the port and met his good lady wife, would be considered irrelevant. And besides, whenever a representative of the wealthy and privileged classes came to court it was inevitable that the accused and whoever was 21on the bench, if they didn’t have a school, college, regiment or club in common, would be married to each other’s cousins, would have met weekending at Binkie and Gloria Shoebridge’s, or would have attended their respective daughters’ coming-out balls.
In court, the first time Mariner used first the phrase ‘this regrettable example of youthful exuberance’ then ‘ebullient high spirits’ Skelton knew he was wasting his time. Whatever he or anybody else said in court, the result, just as the boy had predicted, would be five pounds and a wigging.
And so it was.
Charlie came out onto the steps and saw Skelton sitting on the pier. ‘All right, Mr Skelton?’
Skelton said something vaguely cheerful, but Charlie could tell by his face that he was not all right at all and had a shrewd idea of why he wasn’t all right. He stood in front of Skelton and held up his left hand to show that he was missing the first joint of his little finger.
‘See that?’ he said.
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Russian revolution.’
‘You were in Russia?’
‘No. Black Lion Yard, off the Whitechapel Road. This was the ’05 revolution, not the ’17 one. Lot of Russians live down that way, and when the news came through about the Tsar’s troops shooting people, there was a degree of upset, some people saying one thing and some saying another, mostly in 22Russian, so I couldn’t follow a word of it. Then fights broke out and I got knocked over. Fell against a cart, caught a nasty splinter in there. It went septic and in the end they had to amputate.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘I like to think of it as an injury sustained fighting for a noble cause.’
‘Which side were …?’
‘Bolsheviks?’
‘Do you still …?’
‘Card carrying.’
Skelton had his pipe going nicely now. ‘Is that allowed? Working here?’ he asked.
‘I’m undercover.’
‘Not now you’ve told me, you’re not.’
‘You can be trusted, though, Mr Skelton. I don’t know nothing about your politics, but I know you’re an honest man. You can be trusted.’
‘It’s very nice of you to say so, Charlie.’
‘And I can promise you, when it comes – the revolution – General Sir James Ewers will be first up against the wall.’
‘Sounds a bit extreme.’
Charlie grinned. The clock on St Mary’s church struck the hour and Skelton tried with difficulty to stand. Charlie gave him a hand, which turned into a warm handshake.
‘Give my best to your lad,’ Skelton said.
There were no cabs to be had on Marylebone Road, so Skelton took the underground to Charing Cross, looking forward to a walk along the Victoria Embankment.
Curiously, as he came out of the Tube station, he found himself flanked by crowds of people, all moving in the same direction. He asked a woman with a fox fur and a child grasped firmly by the hand where everybody was going.
‘It’s the Lord Mayor’s Show,’ she replied, as if to a lunatic.
Of course it was. He’d been reading about it in The Times on the train into town that morning. To avoid it, he tried turning up Savoy Street, but the crowds up there seemed even thicker. At Temple Gardens, he gave in and decided he might as well watch the procession along with everybody else, standing five or six deep now, on either side of the road.
Skelton, a head taller than most other people, placed himself at the back so as not to impede anybody’s view and found himself next to a man, almost as tall as himself, with a boy of seven or eight sitting astride his shoulders. They exchanged a friendly nod.
Behind them, a boat on the river hooted. Somebody nearby shouted, ‘Better out than in.’ People laughed. Then they stiffened as, in the distance, they heard the first notes of a military band. First just the drums, then the brass and woodwind.
The players, on horseback, came into view, the drummer in the lead pounding two kettle drums, one on either side of his horse, with great flourishes of his sticks, followed by tubas or something like it, then saxophones and trumpets. 24
Skelton had seen pictures of mounted bands before and had wondered, but, in the flesh, the full absurdity of the phenomenon came clear. Playing a musical instrument was difficult at the best of times. Playing a musical instrument with both hands, while simultaneously controlling a horse with the reins wrapped around one arm seemed unnecessarily complicated, like underwater clock repair or surgeons on skates. Why do it? Why not, say, put them in carts pulled by horses, so that they could concentrate on doing one thing really well.
The lad on his dad’s shoulders seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
‘Are those men soldiers, Dad?’
‘Yes, son.’
‘Where are their guns?’
‘I think they must have left them at home, son.’
The band was followed by more soldiers on horses who seemed to have neither guns nor musical instruments, which made them more pointless still.
Then came various lorries decorated to represent this and that. One that was, according to the banner that preceded it, something to do with St Bartholomew’s Hospital, was done up like a mediaeval castle with people dressed as characters from Robin Hood standing on the battlements. They waved.
‘What’s that, Dad?’
‘Dunno, son.’
‘When will the exciting stuff happen?’ 25
Another, promoting Australian imports, had a chef stirring a huge pudding bowl. This provoked no comment from the lad at all. Skelton checked to see whether he might have gone to sleep.
After a moment’s hiatus, the boy started bouncing and his dad had to hold his feet tight to stop him falling off.
‘I CAN SEE ELEPHANTS!’
This was the exciting stuff he’d come for.
Skelton could see them, too. Four real elephants were lumbering down the road, attended by mahouts with canes and feathered turbans. The front two, side by side, had howdahs on their backs. They were followed by two more in single file, the one bringing up the rear holding the next one’s tail in his trunk.
‘Dad, can you see the elephants? Dad, they’re real elephants. Dad, they’re elephants. Elephants, Dad. Dad, look, look, it’s elephants!’
Something was wrong.
The elephants seemed alarmed. The front ones veered off course. The others followed. They hurtled into the crowd. Some people fell, others tried to rush away. There was a crush. Skelton, the man and the boy fell, with Skelton breaking the boy’s fall. His hat and glasses went flying. A bony woman fell on top of him, their faces uncompromisingly close. He couldn’t breathe, not just because the woman’s hat was covering his face and nose but because there was too much pressure on his chest, and something sharp digging into his ribs. Something hit his leg and turned his foot back. 26
The pain eased gradually as those who were still standing managed to move away and those who had fallen began to stand. The sound was different. Where a few moments earlier there had been cheering and chatter, now there was silence broken by groans and, somewhere up the line, a scream of pain.
The thin woman managed to stand. She muttered a few words of apology. Skelton was about to ask whether she was all right, but she’d gone. His head hurt, his foot hurt, his ribs hurt. Worst of all was his leg. He’d spent his childhood in and out of hospital, enduring operations, manipulations, one sort of brace after another trying to sort out the displaced hip he’d been born with. Nothing had ever worked. Still he walked with a limp. Now it hurt more than it had for years.
‘No, I’m fine, Dad,’ the lad was saying. ‘I fell on that man and he had his hand over my head so nobody could fall on me.’
The boy’s dad, who was standing, apparently unharmed, stood over Skelton and said, ‘Do you need some help?’
Skelton accepted the man’s offer and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He could stand. Nothing appeared to be broken, but the hip was agony.
‘Are these yours, mister?’ the boy asked holding out his glasses.
One of the arms was a little bent, but mercifully the lenses were intact.
The elephants were nowhere to be seen. Further up the 27line, police, Boy Scouts and the St John’s Ambulance Brigade were attending to the wounded.
‘Shall I ask one of them to come down and have a look at you?’ the man said.
‘No, I’ll be fine,’ Skelton said. The boy picked up his briefcase and umbrella, which lay near. ‘I wonder …?’ Skelton nodded towards his hat, which was rolling in the wind a little way off. The boy raced off to retrieve it.
‘I’m Arthur Skelton, by the way.’
‘Cyril Monkhouse,’ the man said, ‘and this is Howard.’
‘Thank you both very much for your help. What exactly happened?’
‘Some lads, I think,’ Cyril said. ‘Ran out and frightened the elephants.’
‘Ah, yes. A regrettable example of youthful exuberance, I expect,’ Skelton said.
‘Eh?’
‘A phrase I heard used earlier today.’
‘Well …’ Cyril said.
It was a strangely awkward moment. The three of them, Skelton, Cyril and Howard had shared a moment of peril and they were now to part. On the other hand, to say ‘Shall we go and get a drink somewhere’, seemed presumptuous.
‘Well, thank you again, Cyril,’ Skelton said and wondered why he felt so emotional. Almost weepy. Shock, probably.
‘Well, thank you for looking after the boy,’ Cyril said. His voice was cracking, too.
They shook hands with far more grip and enthusiasm than 28either of them intended, and thought but did not say, you are now embarking on the great journey of the rest of your life and may your health be robust, your fortunes prosper and your hopes fulfilled.
Tuesday, 11th November 1930
Skelton drained the soggy bits of stray biscuit, the residue from dunking, from the bottom of his cup and started filling his pipe. He and his clerk Edgar, a dapper man with broad hips and tiny feet, were having their regular morning meeting, in chambers at 8 Foxton Row. To the oak panelling, formidable desk and leather-bound books common to most barrister’s rooms, Skelton had added two easy chairs, the sort with wooden arms, and a low table. He’d never been comfortable at a desk. Sometimes, if he had a lot of hard reading to do and wasn’t expecting any visitors, he would lie on the Turkish carpet.
Today, he felt a particular need for soft furnishings. He was still in pain from the previous day’s misfortunes, stuck 30liberally with plasters and smelling of Germolene, but he had his pipe, there was tea, there were biscuits, and the fire in the grate had reached that comforting stage when the drama of the flames had given way to a sensible glow.
Edgar poured a third cup, moved the tea tray from the low table to the desk and replaced it with the pile of paperwork that needed attention.
‘Do you have curtains?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘In your house? Do you have curtains at the windows?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Green, I think. Or red. One or the other.’
Edgar frowned impatiently. ‘No, I mean what are they made of?’
‘Cloth, I’d imagine.’
‘Velvet? Brocade?’
‘Possibly. Or … is there such a thing as just ordinary cloth?’
Over the previous weeks, Edgar had frequently raised questions of interior decoration. Having lived in boarding houses of one sort or another practically all his life, now, at the age of forty-six, he had acquired a flat of his own, in a mansion block in Belsize Park, and had engaged an excellent housekeeper to cook and clean.
‘I don’t think I can have curtains,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘I mean, I have curtains at the moment. They came with 31the flat. A sort of jacquard damask with a floral pattern in washed teal and a royal blue.’
‘Oh,’ Skelton said, slightly alarmed, the way you would be if somebody suddenly and for no reason began speaking in the language of the Iroquois people.
‘They’re very ugly. And I know I have to replace them with something, and I look at this fabric and that fabric, and they all seem equally unpleasant. There are one or two Eloise Bourgeois very angular geometric designs that just about pass muster, but I am tempted to go the way of Le Corbusier, dispense with curtains altogether and have shutters installed. Or would that be too austere, do you think?’
Skelton sat back and smoked his pipe happily, enjoying the way Edgar made a meal of the nonsense syllables – ‘jacquard damask’, ‘Eloise Bourgeois’, ‘Le Corbusier’.
Edgar, like Skelton, was not top drawer by birth. As a boy he’d lived an almost feral life with a mother and a varying number of brothers and sisters – some of whom may have been strays taken in from other families – in a series of hovels, usually in the Bethnal Green or Stepney areas of London. Somewhere along the line he had acquired the habit of reading – anything from a discarded sardine tin to Plato’s Republic – and, under the tutelage of Tyser Knapp, a career criminal, had learnt the art of the snakesman as well as dipping, parlour-jumping, and flying the blue pigeon. He would, like Tyser, almost certainly have ended up dying young of prison fever were it not for an enlightened magistrate who, impressed by the boy’s carefully argued 32rebuttal of the charges against him (he cited Blackstone twice), instead of sending him for a whipping and a lagging, secured him a position as errand boy at a chambers in Chancery Lane where Edgar had learnt his lessons as quickly as he had done under Tyser Knapp. Within six months he had acquired beautifully legible handwriting and absorbed the rules of punctuality, politeness, spickness and spanness, as well as a good grounding in the workings of the legal professions. He had also acquired the voice he had possessed ever since and would be the first to admit that he might have overdone it. Hard work rounding the vowels and sharpening the consonants had resulted in, rather than the timbres of gravelly gravitas he had hoped for, the shriek of an outraged duchess. Over the years he had learnt to control both the volume and pitch of the shriek so that it was bearable at all times, and now and then pleasant to listen to, even musical. In the space of a single sentence he could run from a dolcemente basso profundo to Wagnerian soprano and the elastic eyebrows always followed the pitch.
‘You need space, though, don’t you?’ he said, ‘for shutters. To allow freedom of movement when they open and close.’ He mimed the opening and closing, first with arms out and eyebrows up, then arms in and eyebrows down. ‘Although, sometimes in old houses you see shutters in two or three hinged sections, don’t you? I wonder if Ernest could run something up for me.’
He’d mentioned Ernest before, a man in a mews who made things from wood and metal. Edgar swore by Ernest. 33
‘What do you think?’
‘I think …’ Skelton said, and, after a long pause, decided to leave it there.
It had never occurred to him that what Edgar called ‘interior design’ could be a topic of interest. He remembered, a long while ago, when he and his wife Mila had first moved into their house in Lambourn, going to a shop in Reading that seemed to sell ordinary-looking furniture and ordering a houseful of it, and then choosing, from sample books, whatever seemed the least offensive wallpaper and curtains. Neither of them had taken any real interest in the proceedings. Pictures had proved a little more difficult until they discovered that people were often only too happy to let you have their unwanted ones, often nicely framed. So, they’d hung some of those here and there wherever the walls seemed bare. Fruit and views, mostly.
Edgar took a Gold Flake from his cigarette case and lit it thoughtfully, then, deciding they should get on, picked up the pile of papers and started sorting them.
‘Letters from all over the place about the Abrasives business,’ he said.
Romero and Gaines versus Anglo-American Abrasives was a case that had been going on, in one form or another, for months. Sometimes it reared its head as Anglo-American Abrasives versus Thomas, Briggs and Studely-Hogg, and sometimes as Thomas and Briggs versus Studely-Hogg. Skelton had yet another meeting about the matter later in the morning and picked through the correspondence to see if 34anything might require his immediate attention. He had practically lost track of exactly who was suing whom and had long ago ceased to care one way or the other, but he persisted if only because Edgar’s share of the majestic fees provided him with the means to go the way of Le Corbusier and keep Ernest-in-the-mews gainfully employed.
Edgar untied the ribbons on a new brief and announced, ‘Rex versus Denison Beck.’
Skelton already knew something of the case. It had come in from Aubrey Duncan, the solicitor who’d been shanghaied by General Ewers to summon a barrister, and with whom Skelton and Edgar had worked so frequently in the past that he was almost family.
Denison Beck was a ‘medical electrician’ with premises in Wimpole Street who, according to his advertisements, claimed to be able to cure, with his Frankenstein apparatus, anything from ‘incapacity for exertion’ to ‘disrelish for food’ to ‘spermatorrhoea’. Skelton could only guess the nature of ‘spermatorrhoea’.
Beck’s ‘cures’ had become quite the thing among the smart set, who hoped they might alleviate their permanent hangovers thus enabling them to drink more, and among old fogeys who wanted neither to be old nor fogeys.
Mrs Edith Roberts was a former Gaiety Girl whose dancing career had been brought to a tragic end when, while executing a particularly difficult manoeuvre during a song entitled ‘A Lot of Funny Folks One Sees at Ladies’ Universities’, she collided at speed with a canvas horse 35and sustained some injury to her back that forced her into retirement from the musical stage.
Luckily, she subsequently made a good marriage with a wine and spirits dealer three times her age, who died soon after the wedding leaving her comfortably off.
The bad back had never got better and at times gave her great pain. According to friends and her maid, though she had searched high and low, she had never been able to find a medical practitioner who could form an accurate diagnosis, never mind suggest an effective cure. Until, that is, she encountered Denison Beck. She made frequent visits to Beck’s consulting rooms, sometimes twice or three times a week. Over the course of a year, the back was considerably improved.
Then poor Mrs Roberts had suffered a heart attack and died. She was a forty-two-year-old woman, healthy apart from her bad back, with no history of heart disease. The coroner smelt a rat. Suspicion fell on Beck’s treatments. Experts inspected his electrical equipment and concluded that mechanical fault or human error could easily have fatal consequences.
Beck was arrested on a charge of manslaughter.
Skelton picked up the brief and glanced at the first page. ‘And the prosecution think they can make this stick?’
‘Apparently so.’
Skelton wrinkled his nose sceptically. ‘Manslaughter by negligence?’
‘It is indeed the slimmest of cases. I’d imagine the defence 36would simply be a matter of repeating the arguments that were used in the Bateman appeal.’
They were both aware of Rex versus Bateman, in which a doctor who had botched the delivery of a baby, killing both the mother and the child, was found guilty of ‘gross negligence manslaughter’ but subsequently had the verdict quashed when the appeal judge ruled that mens rea – criminal intent – had not been proven.
‘Except there is a difference,’ Skelton said. ‘Does Beck have any formal qualifications?’
‘There might be a certificate from a Peruvian university, but nothing that’s recognised by the British Medical Association.’
‘So, if the prosecution argues that Beck has no recognised medical qualifications and that therefore the entire enterprise is fraudulent, they’ll have their “criminal intent” and Rex versus Bateman won’t apply. Is Beck in Brixton?’ Skelton asked.
‘He got bail.’
‘Really?’
‘Marylebone Police Court,’
‘Mariner on the bench?’
‘I’d assume so.’
‘That man really does work on the assumption that anyone with a posh voice and an income of more than £800 a year is innocent and everybody else is guilty. Can we arrange a meeting with Beck, perhaps later this week?’
Edgar stood up to get the appointments book from 37Skelton’s desk. As he did so, Skelton’s attention was drawn to his trousers. They had the most impeccable creases he had ever seen. Brand-new trousers, fresh from the tailor, were never creased so perfectly. And the sides, between the creases, were smooth as glass. Skelton looked down at his own trousers, which looked, as they always did, as if they’d recently seen service for potato storage.
‘I can see you’re admiring my trousers,’ Edgar said, smiling. ‘All the work of the redoubtable Mrs Stewart, my housekeeper. I think I may have already mentioned that her cleaning is of a standard rarely met in operating theatres, but that is far from being the greatest of her arts. If wars could be settled on the ironing board Mrs Stewart could conquer the world.’
‘Does she have some special trick?’
‘Several, I think, the most noticeable being the use of pins.’
‘Pins?’
‘She pins the trousers to the board so they’re practically rigid and you don’t get all that unexpected rumpling.’
‘Don’t the pins make holes?’
Edgar put one foot on the low table to get a closer look.
‘None that I can see. Perhaps she’s very careful to pin through the weave. Or perhaps you can get special pins. Very thin ones.’
Skelton began to notice other details. Edgar had always been nicely turned out but today his shirt looked like something in a book about angels, his shoes, which were 38the ones specially made for Edgar’s difficult feet, looked brand new even though they were at least a year old, and his waistcoat, that most difficult of all garments, sat tight and seemed to move with him like a second skin. He decided to contact his old Cambridge college and suggest they institute a degree in Domestic Management and Maintenance with Mrs Stewart as Senior Professor.
He was on his way to the Anglo-American Abrasives meeting in Chancery Lane when the clocks struck the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The city came to a standstill. Trams stopped. Horses snorted. Women clutched prams and bowed their heads as if at an altar rail. A sandwich board man, advertising two-shilling permanent waves, stood rigidly to attention.
In the two minutes’ silence, Skelton thought of the snapshot, taken when he was at Cambridge, of him and four other students posed in what they had hoped was a dignified manner in the quad at Pembroke. It stood, framed, on the mantlepiece at his parents’ house in Leeds. He was the only survivor of that group of five. Both of his brothers had come through it, thank God, but he’d lost cousins and schoolfriends. Edgar had lost two brothers and had another brother who, shell-shocked, took his own life in ’21. And everywhere, twelve years after it was all over, you saw men with a leg, an arm or half a face missing, men still trying to cough the gas out of their lungs, men and women who at the going down of the sun and in the morning could not 39unknow what they knew and could not unsee what they had seen.
The American Abrasives meeting was as tedious as mumps. The room was overheated by steam radiators. One of the Romero and Gaines people spoke for forty-five minutes in an unchanging drone about the ultra vires rule and the principle of vicarious liability until Skelton was digging fingernails into his thighs in an effort to stay awake.
It was, therefore, with a sense of half-holiday relief that, just before six, he found himself picking a way through the rotten fruit and cabbage stalks left over from the Leather Lane market for an early dinner.
Mila, his wife, had, for years, taken part in a discussion group in Maidenhead. They chose a topic a week. Mila thrived on a robust political discussion. She had caused outrage among the more staid members of the group by her support for Bolshevism, but, more recently, appalled by Stalin’s treatment of Trotsky, she had veered away from Bolshevism and towards the collectivist anarchism advocated by Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. This, of course, outraged the staid members even more. There was talk of banning her lest she brought the bombs they were sure she must possess to meetings.
Often the Maidenhead group would invite guest speakers, one of whom, Gillian McPhail, a lecturer in French literature at Birkbeck College in London, gave a talk on French symbolist poetry and its legacy. 40
Afterwards, Mrs McPhail and Mila had fallen into conversation about Proudhon, the anarchist philosopher and Gillian had suggested that Mila should come along to an informal course that she was planning at Birkbeck called ‘Trends in Modern Thought’ and Mila had thought it would suit her down to the ground. She’d been looking for a new challenge. Earlier that year she had learnt to fly an aeroplane, but had found it was an expensive hobby and, in light of the various aeronautical disasters that seemed to crop up on a weekly basis, most notably the crash of the R101 airship in the previous month, possibly too perilous for a woman with a husband and two children. So, she gave it up not long after getting her licence. Though her understanding of politics could put most cabinet ministers to shame, she had never had much in the way of formal education. Her girls’ school, while giving students a firm grounding in the need to play up and play the game, regarded more scholarly matters as men’s business. So, Gillian’s course seemed just the thing.
Before the seven o’clock class (Gillian preferred to call them ‘meetings’) she and Skelton had got into the habit of taking an early dinner together in a little cafe she’d found not far from the college on Leather Lane.
The cafe’s Victorian sign had faded, leaving only the letters ‘Mel Hy’ visible. Nobody could remember what was there before the cafe came into existence. Reg, the current proprietor’s theory – that it was the ‘Melton Mowbray Hygienic Pork-Pie Company’ – was probably as good as 41anybody’s, but Skelton preferred to believe that it was once the premises of a violin-playing mesmerist who traded as ‘The Melodious Hypnotist’, while Mila went with an ice-sculpture workshop specialising in flowers called ‘Melting Hydrangeas’.
The people who worked in the market never called it anything except ‘Smelly Melly’s’.
The menu, based on various kinds of stodge, suited them. Though they both enjoyed French cuisine when they were in France, in England the folderol that usually came with it in posh restaurants didn’t suit them at all. Their mistrust of anything fancy – Mila was a Socialist, Skelton was from Leeds – like their penchant for the smell of boot polish and their aversion to satin, was a key ingredient in the cement that bound them together.
Skelton saw his wife through the steamy window, deeply absorbed in one of the several newspapers she read each day. She had a pencil in her hand which meant that she was either marking up stories which, for one reason or another, particularly outraged her – she was fond of outrage – or she was doing the crossword.
‘It was all started by some students, apparently, from King’s College,’ Mila said, as soon as she saw him enter. This was par for the course. She rarely bothered with formalities, preambles and preliminaries, preferring to jump straight to the middle of a conversation and keep going until her husband caught up.
She picked up the Daily Graphic and read aloud, ‘“They 42were waiting with the college mascot representing a lion. The mascot was waved, and fireworks discharged”.’
Skelton twigged. The elephants at the Lord Mayor’s Show.
‘I don’t remember hearing any fireworks,’ he said. He eased his bad leg out to one side. It would present a tripping hazard for an inexperienced waiter bearing a tray of badly stacked glasses, but Reg, he knew, was canny.
‘Perhaps they were the ones that fizz without banging.’
Skelton nodded and Mila continued, ‘“The elephants decided that they had had enough and charged the students. One of them was chased around a tree but escaped. Other people who had nothing to do with the escapade were knocked over and trampled on by the crowd”.’
‘Was anybody actually killed?’ Skelton asked.
‘“Eleven persons were treated at Charing Cross Hospital for slight injuries”,’ Mila read, ‘“but no one was detained. Mr Race Power, of Brixton Hill, manager of Power’s Dancing Elephants, said tonight: ‘The four elephants, which belong to my wife, are all about thirty years old. This is the first time in our whole experience that they have been involved in anything of the kind. They are four big pets, and they are as good as little children.’” “Colour slightly”.’
‘What?’
‘Crossword clue. Five letters. “Colour slightly”.’
‘Paint.’
‘Ends in an E.’
‘Rouge.’ 43
‘Second letter I.’
‘Filne.’
‘That’s not a word.’
‘You’re so fussy.’
The food came. Both had ordered pie with spuds, greens and gravy. Once, a customer, a city type, had asked Reg what kind of pie it was.
‘Meat,’ Reg had replied.
‘What kind of meat?’ the gent had asked, and Reg had laughed all the way back to the kitchen.
‘Poachers do rabbits.’
‘What?’
‘Twelve across. Something something S something something something E.’
‘Poachers do rabbits?’
‘That’s what it says.’
‘Shouldn’t it be “Poachers do this to rabbits”? Trap, shoot, eat, kill, snare.’
‘Snare would fit at the end, but it’s only five letters. There’s another two on the front.’
‘Resnare, unsnare. Is “ensnare” a word?’
‘More of a word than “filne”.’ Mila wrote it in.
The pie came. The crust was exactly the right consistency to soak up gravy without getting soggy.
‘Did you finish your homework?’ Skelton asked.
‘It’s not homework. It’s recommended reading.’ Mila passed him a book called Russian Poetry, An Anthology. Skelton turned a couple of pages. It didn’t look promising. 44‘And Gillian gave us some cyclostyled notes.’ Skelton sniffed the notes. Sometimes cyclostyles smelt interesting. These didn’t.
‘Pushkin,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘He was a Russian poet. I can’t think of any others.’
‘Gillian is very keen on the revolutionary ones, Mayakovsky and Esenin.’
‘Are they good?’
‘It depends what you mean by “good”.’
‘Like Longfellow.’ At school, Skelton had learnt chunks of Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus, Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and Wordsworth’s Daffodils. He liked the Hesperus best, so considered Longfellow his favourite poet.
‘Not much like Longfellow, no.’
‘Are they old or young?’ Young poets, he knew, were often feckless recent graduates pretending to be poets. The old ones had at least stuck at it.
‘Fairly young, I think. But dead.’
‘Famine?’
