Cash My Chips, Croupier Page 7

  By five o’clock she was feeling wide awake and the discomfort in her mouth had lessened appreciatively. At half-past five she got out of bed for the last time and dressed. She made herself a cup of tea and then took one up to her still sleeping husband.

  ‘Bert!’

  She roused him with a loud hail that reached through his slumbers far enough to make him turn over without awakening him. So she put down the cup of tea, pulled back the bedclothes and thumped his shoulder.

  ‘What the hell!’ he started, jack-knifing upright before he opened his eyes. When he did and saw her he said, ‘Oh, how’s the tooth?’

  ‘I didn’t have a good night with it,’ she informed him. ‘No point staying in bed, so I got up and made a cuppa. I brought you one. You can have another half-hour if you like.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said again, thinking about it. He was a man who habitually took his time with thinking, for he found it a process deserving of all the time one could devote to it if one wished to have no regrets later. ‘Yes,’ he added, without announcing what he was confirming. ‘Good.’

  He held out his hand for the cup of tea she had brought him, and when she passed it to him said, ‘Thanks, I will.’

  She didn’t stay to inquire what he meant. Ever since she had known Bert Bowden he had been a man of few words and the vast majority of them limited to one syllable.

  She clumped down the bare stairs outside the bedroom door, and in the kitchen finished a cup of tea that was no longer hot and poured herself a second. This she sucked through her teeth, screwing up her face with masochistic fervour as the scalding brown liquid rose like a steaming tide against the troublesome tooth.

  When her sucking had emptied the cup she passed into the yard and stared across the moist earth to the expanse of their hundred and twenty acres of what was classified as ‘mixed’ in the local farm directory.

  She started for the barn where Lilac had her calf. The shorthorn had been a bit temperamental at first, and Bert had thought they might lose the calf. As it wasn’t a bull calf he had worried about it, but, in his customary fashion when worried, he had left her to remove the cause of his worry in her own fashion.

  She had tied Lilac’s mouth, risking the milk supply, but thirty-six hours of that treatment had changed either Lilac’s temperament or her simple bovine temper. She had been hungry enough to eat her fill and had then got down to the real job of suckling her offspring, which looked as though there was a strong streak of Alderney in some back page of its history.

  Mary Bowden pulled the staple from the lock with a wrenching sound that made her clamp her jaws. Fortunately the tooth was still recovering from the hot tea. She suffered no additional pain.

  When the door was pegged back she entered into the mixed smell of air perfumed with hay and manure with an overtone of sulphur.

  ‘Good morning, Lilac, you silly old thing,’ she greeted the brown-faced animal that turned a head to look at her with eyes the pinky-blue tinge of a freshly skinned rabbit’s coat lining. ‘You still behaving yourself?’

  Lilac wiped her mouth with a whitey-pink tongue, disturbing some flies that had been exploring her moist nostrils.

  The cow stamped as Mary Bowden moved forward to take a look at the calf, hidden by Lilac’s brown body. Before she reached the far side of Lilac’s stall the woman was stopped in mid-stride by the sound of a thump from the far end of the small barn.

  It was too loud for a rat, and a fox wouldn’t have got lazy when she pulled the staple from the door lock. But she knew Bert had put none of the other livestock in the barn. If space was going to save Lilac’s calf, then the mulish shorthorn should have the barn to herself. That was how Bert Bowden thought. One-track-minded, his wife considered it. She also considered that a prime reason why they would never end up rich.

  End up was another of her customary personal clichés, like hold with.

  The thump came again, and this time, listening for it, she decided it could be someone lying prone thumping with his feet. Yet she couldn’t understand how a tramp could get in out of last night’s rain and shut and staple the door after him. Besides, these days tramps were choosy. They had enough National Assistance money, as she still thought of it, to allow them likes and dislikes in greater variety than she herself could afford, which only went to show how upside-down the world had become, when summer time had become standard time and there were five new pence in a sixpence — or was it a shilling?

  She reached past Lilac’s stall and collected a billhook. For Mary Bowden had little fear in her, and the thought of running outside to get her husband did not occur to her as any valid alternative to what she was doing.

  Someone was in the end stall, she was certain.

  So she marched forward, with the billhook held forward threateningly, and she called out, ‘Come out of it, whoever you are!’

  But the only response was another thump, a little louder perhaps, and then a smaller sound, rather like a strangled gasp, which, she allowed, was decidedly odd. It certainly wasn’t something she had expected to hear in Lilac’s barn. As though the cow had some curious animal affinity with the woman who had taught her reason in the matter of bringing up a calf, Lilac opened her mouth in a moist-sounding moo that spun around the inside of the barn as though anxious to catch up its own echoes before they sounded.

  Mary Bowden advanced on the end stall, the billhook still gripped with challenging menace for any trespasser, and came to a halt at the opening. A pile of loosely tossed hay in the stall trembled and shivered as another thump sounded.

  ‘Come out of it, I tell you,’ called Mary Bowden, anger now threading her tone.

  The strangled sound was the only response. It came from the opposite end of the hay pile from that which had produced the thumping sound she had heard.

  ‘All right,’ she snapped, and chopped away the bulging top from the hay pile with her billhook.

  This action revealed a circular gap in the hay through which slowly rose a pair of knees covered in dark grey cloth.

  ‘Well, get up, you damned fool,’ she ordered. ‘No good pretending you haven’t been found. What are you trying to do for God’s sake — smother yourself?’

  Whoever the possessor of the dark grey trousers was, he appealed to her as an unreasonable person, for he provided no further evidence of having heard her command and the comment following it than another strangling gasp. This roused her anger and resentment.

  Could he be drunk?

  The thought drained her of any remaining patience with someone she had silently labelled a damned fool and a bothering nuisance. She promptly categorised the man hidden under the hay in the end stall of Lilac’s barn as no better than a tramp. His deliberate refusal to comply with her demand put some buckram over her backbone, as the homely metaphor ran in her mind.

  As though that knotty portion of her anatomy needed it!

  The billhook swished twice close to the elevated knees. Hay fell in wisps to each side of the stall to reveal a pair of tied ankles.

  Mary Bowden stared wide-eyed at them, at the same time listening to further strangling sounds, and suddenly cried out, ‘Oh, my God!’

  Feverishly the billhook swept at the hay covering the man’s face. She took two uncertain paces past the tied ankles and bent down to stare into a pair of wide eyes full of outrage that could not be expressed verbally by a mouth securely closed with a wide strip of electrical tape.

  Perversely, as it seemed to the man she freed from his bonds, she left uncovering his mouth until her fumbling fingers had loosened the bonds around his ankles and those binding his wrists, which had been pulled together at the base of his spine.

  When she started to drag at the tape over his mouth he knocked her hand away and did it himself, slowly, swearing softly, and giving the impression that it was an operation requiring great care and concentration if his lips were not to be removed with the dark adhesive.

  ‘How did you get there?’ she demanded.

  The tap
e removed from his mouth, he massaged the flesh around it with gentle fingers.

  ‘I don’t know. I was knocked out. I remember that. When I came to I was under that damned hay and some cow was creating with a racket that seemed to split my head.’

  ‘Lilac.’

  He turned to look at her, and in the shadows of the barn she saw that he was a man whose earlier good looks were going to flabbiness from knots of lard. He wasn’t young and he wasn’t past middle age. She had difficulty in deciding how old he could be. She settled for somewhere in the late thirties.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  And a Londoner, judging by his tongue. That made her suspicious. She was suspicious of Londoners on principle.

  ‘Lilac’s got her calf in this barn.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He began rubbing his hands over his face.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ she said.

  He caught the sly note in her voice, looked at the billhook she had resumed holding like a defensive weapon, and started to entertain a few suspicions of his own.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Those knots were slip-knots. If you’d really struggled you could have got free.’

  His gaze lifted to her face.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I know a slip-knot.’ She hesitated. ‘Who are you, mister?’

  ‘My name’s Michael Perran. Where is this?’

  ‘Little Dippers Farm, Sussex.’

  ‘Sussex!’ He certainly sounded surprised by the news.

  ‘Not far from Petworth. You know it?’

  ‘Can’t say I do, but doesn’t Fred Streeter, the radio gardener, pass out his words of wisdom from there?’

  ‘You don’t sound as though you’ve much time for old Fred,’ she said critically.

  ‘I’m not a gardener. I live in a flat.’

  She sniffed, still registering deep criticism of what she had heard.

  ‘I’ll go and get my husband. You wait here.’

  ‘Can’t I come and get a drink? I’m parched. My throat feels choked from being under all that muck — ’

  ‘That wasn’t muck,’ she interrupted severely. ‘That hay cost — ’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He added placating motions with his hands, at which she retreated quickly a couple of steps and brandished the billhook. ‘Can’t you understand, Mrs. — I don’t know your name,’ he ended uncertainly.

  ‘Bowden. I’m getting my husband.’

  ‘Do that. But let me get a drink, and if I could have a wash I’d be very grateful.’

  She committed herself no farther than by another sniff, which was virtually empty of promise, turned, and walked out of the barn, Perran following her.

  As they crossed the yard he turned his head and looked about him to see what the early morning revealed. Whatever he expected, it was not what his eyes beheld.

  ‘Hey, Mrs. Bowden, look. How did that get here?’

  She stopped and turned about, and looked at the grey Ford car to which he pointed. She had not noticed it earlier.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen it before. You know it?’

  ‘I ought to. It’s mine.’

  ‘Yours!’ She sounded not only surprised, but genuinely startled. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  She started walking towards it, and after watching her advance for half a dozen paces he followed. She reached the door opening on to the driver’s seat and pulled at the handle. It opened readily.

  She turned her head to call, ‘Not locked.’

  Perran reached her side, looked over her shoulder and saw the black leather bag.

  He heard a sound like a siphon being squirted. It was himself grabbing a suddenly very necessary breath to fill his empty lungs.

  ‘I’ll put that in the boot,’ he said.

  He received a distinctly dubious look from his female companion.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, but made no move to prevent him reaching into the car and collecting the bag. She saw a look on his face that was disturbing when she tried to analyse it. It seemed to her that he was angry and anxious at the same time. Well, perhaps it was not unnatural in the circumstances, though she did not know exactly what the circumstances were. She was confused and mistrustful, but she wasn’t sure of what, though she knew of whom. This Michael Perran struck her as being glib and thoroughly without any reasonable explanation about how he had arrived, and that was enough to make her mistrustful of any man.

  She watched him take the bag from the rear seat, then go round to the rear of the car. He appeared to hesitate, she thought, before reaching out a hand to release the boot cover. But the cover was locked. She watched him tugging before his hand dropped.

  She said, ‘The keys are in the ignition.’

  ‘Are they?’

  Her mouth became firmed down in a colourless line, and there was a spark in her eyes as she moved from the front door. He made to reach out for the keys in the ignition, but just as he was about to grasp them there was a blast of martial music which made him jump back. The first blast became crashing chords of brass that welled across the yard.

  ‘What the hell’s broken loose?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s only Bert,’ Mary Bowden said mildly, but with a curious hint of some deep-lying satisfaction under her remark.

  ‘Bert?’

  ‘My husband. He’s out of bed and dressing. He always puts on a brass band. Gets him properly awake.’

  Sousa’s Semper Fidelis was at last showing a prospect of collecting itself into a tune one could whistle. Anyway, someone was whistling the tune as though competing with the band.

  ‘Bert, I take it,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Doesn’t take him long to put on his clothes. Bert can move when one wants him to.’ She sounded so smug he gave her a quick look to see if he could discern what prompted this piece of information. ‘He’ll be down soon now,’ she added and smacked the billhook against her thigh as though to remind his wandering attention that she still had it.

  ‘All right,’ Perran said. ‘Well — ’

  But he found there was nothing else to say. He turned as the invisible Bert Bowden began to part company with the band of his choice in the matter of key, and hooked the keys from the dashboard.

  Like someone anxious to be finished with the job he was performing, Perran swung around and went back to the boot, and Mary Bowden came after him. He inserted the key in the lock of the boot, turned it, and swung up the lid.

  Then he stood like a man who had lost all feeling and motion, frozen in a pose of unbelievable horror. Mary Bowden came round the end of the car and looked in the boot to where his gaze seemed concentrated.

  She screamed.

  A second time.

  A third time.

  Then the martial music stopped in the middle of a high note. So did the whistling.

  As though called upon to make some barnyard comment, a rooster crowed. Micky Perran didn’t even hear the sound.

  The ringing of the telephone got Frank Drury out of bed. It stopped while he was still on the edge of sleep, and then his wife’s voice said, ‘It’s for you, Frank.’ He wasn’t fully awake when his slippered feet padded into the hall at the foot of the stairs and he took the instrument from her. He widened his sleep-raddled eyes in an expression she knew well after he had been up most of the night.

  ‘Sounds urgent,’ she said, and went into the kitchen, closing the door after her.

  She had been a policeman’s wife long enough to know and not resent the fact that certain things were expected of her. One was to be discreetly absent when something important was about to be phoned from Scotland Yard.

  She had the kettle singing and was doing things to a couple of eggs she had cracked into a bowl when her husband came in. She gave one look at his face, turned down the gas jet under the kettle, and put a knob of lard into a warming frying-pan. ‘Sit down,’ she said, making way for him to sit at the
kitchen table, where a place was set for him.

  ‘I’ve got to go in. You’re right. It was damned urgent.’

  ‘You’ll be better with some breakfast inside you.’

  The words rang faraway responses in his mind. She had spoken them, in just that voice for years past, whenever a message had summoned him back to the Super Grindstone as she had once described New Scotland Yard. He had once wondered where else he should put his breakfast save inside him, and had been convulsed by a rapid picture of scrambled egg and fatty bacon decorating his stomach and thighs. He had refused to tell her the reason for laughing, but always when she made the same comment it was accompanied by a quick look, as though she suspected him of enjoying a secret joke she was not allowed to share.

  ‘Anything to make me feel better,’ he said.

  He was diminishing his second cup of coffee when she said, ‘It was late when you came in.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘It says in the paper you’re working on a murder case,’ she said while stacking dishes and plates in the sink.

  ‘Don’t believe all you read. You know the newspapers.’

  ‘I also know you, Frank.’

  ‘You should. I’ve been around a long time.’

  ‘Is it that Toni Cuzak?’

  He finished his coffee. He put the cup down quietly in its saucer, then picked up both and carried them to her.

  ‘He’s one.’

  She looked at him with wide eyes. ‘You mean there’s more than one? The paper doesn’t mention any others.’

  ‘One other, and the paper wouldn’t know. The Sussex Regional Crime Squad got through a short while ago. They’ve been out to some farm, where a girl’s body was found in the back of a car. I think it was the boot.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean she hasn’t been identified?’

  ‘I mean she isn’t available to be identified. The man whose car it was drove off shortly before the Regional Crime Squad arrived.’

  ‘How does that drop this other murder into your lap, Frank?’

  ‘The farmer’s wife remembered the car’s number.’