The Best British Mysteries III

The Day of Two Cars by Gillian Linscott

‘It was a young woman who found him,’ the village constable said. ‘Molly Davitt, the blacksmith’s daughter. She thought he was having a conversation on the telephone. After a while when he didn’t move she decided something might be wrong.’

‘After how long, exactly?’ the inspector asked. He was a city man and disliked vagueness.

‘Half an hour or so, Molly says. Could be longer.’

‘You mean to tell me this young woman stood watching a man in a telephone box for half an hour or more?’

‘There’s not much happens round here. And the fact is, Molly’s been fascinated with that telephone box from the time they put it up.’

It was the spring of 1924 when they came to install the telephone box in Tadley Gate. Nobody was quite sure why. The men from the Post Office travelled from Hereford, seventeen miles away as the pigeon flew and half as much again by winding country road. All they knew was that they’d been instructed to erect the standard model Kiosk One, designed to be especially suitable for rural areas, on the edge of the common, in between the old pump and the new war memorial. It was made of reinforced concrete slabs with a red painted wooden door and large windows in the door and sides. In a touch of Post Office swagger, a decorative curlicue of wrought iron crowned it, finishing in a spike that some people assumed was an essential part of the mechanism. Nobody in Tadley Gate (pop. 227) had asked for a telephone kiosk and very few had ever used a telephone. Still, they were pleased. The coming of the kiosk was an event at least, which made two events in eighteen months, counting back to the other new arrival, the petrol pump. The petrol pump belonged to Davy Davitt, Molly’s father. A third-generation blacksmith by trade, he’d had more than enough of horses and fallen in love with cars. The sign over his workshop said ‘Blacksmith and Farrier’ in the curly old-fashioned letters that had been good enough for his grandfather. Underneath he’d painted, stark and white, ‘Motor Vehicle Repairs Undertaken’. The fact that the parish included thirty-three horses and ponies and only one motor car limited his scope but he was a resourceful man. Long negotiations with a distant petrol company ended with the arrival of a tank and a pump. The pump was red like the phone kiosk door, topped by a globe of frosted glass with a cockleshell and ‘Sealed Shell’ on it in black letters. The tank below it held 500 gallons of petrol, delivered by motor tanker. In the first year Davy’s only sales were five gallons every other week to the colonel from the big house who drove a Hillman Peace model very cautiously, so at that rate it would be nearly four years before the tanker needed to come with another delivery. But as Davey told anybody who’d listen in the Duke of Wellington, that was only the start. He was looking ahead to the arrival of the motor tourer. It stood to reason that as more people bought cars and the cars became more reliable, they’d drive for the pleasure far away from cities and into the countryside. It didn’t matter the only motor tourist Tadley Gate had ever seen was somebody who’d got badly confused on the way to Shrewsbury and didn’t want to be there.

Davy believed in the petrol pump the way an Indian believed in his totem pole. He was even inclined to credit it with attracting the telephone kiosk to the village. He reasoned that now, properly equipped with both telephone and petrol pump, Tadley Gate was ready to unglue itself from the mud and enter the age of speed. Only the age of speed seemed to be taking its time about getting there.

Molly had no strong feelings about the petrol pump. She didn’t like the smell much, but petrol was no worse than the throat-grabbing whiff of burning horn when her father fitted red-hot shoes to horses’ hooves. On the other hand, the phone-box enchanted her from the day it arrived. She was twenty then and single, having just broken her engagement to a local farmer’s son. The second broken engagement, as it happened, and more than enough to get her a reputation as a jilt. She honestly regretted that. She’d quite liked the farmer’s son, as she’d quite liked the young grain merchant before him, but shied away from marriage because they were both of them firmly tied by work and family to the country around Tadley Gate. If she married either of them she’d have had to stay there for life and she knew – with the instinct that tells a buried bulb which way is upwards – that staying at Tadley Gate wasn’t the way things were meant to be. She’d been away from the village once, for a family wedding in Birmingham where she’d been a bridesmaid. In the days before and after the ceremony she’d gone with her cousins to the cinema, bought underwear in a department store, read the Daily Mail and seen advertisements in magazines of sleek women poised on diving boards, leaning against the bonnets of cars, dancing quick-time foxtrot in little pointed shoes with men in evening dress. At the end of the visit, she’d gone quietly back to Tadley Gate with a new shorter hairstyle that nobody commented on, an unused lipstick tucked into her skirt pocket and a conviction as deep as her father’s belief in his petrol pump that the world must somehow find itself her way. The men who came to set up the telephone kiosk, pleased to find an unexpectedly beautiful girl in such an out of the way place, had been only too pleased as they worked to answer the questions she put to them in her soft local accent.

‘So who can you talk to from here?’ (She had the idea that a telephone had a predetermined number of lines, each one to a different and single other telephone.)

‘Anyone,’ they said.

The elder and more serious of the two explained that when she went to the kiosk and picked up the receiver, a buzzer would sound in the telephone exchange. Then, in exchange for coins in the slot, the operator would connect her with anybody she wanted, anywhere in the country.

‘But how would she know? How would the operator know where to find them?’

‘Everybody has their own number,’ the older man explained, ‘they’re written down on a list.’

‘So if you had a particular friend,’ the younger man said, risking a wink at her, ‘he’d give you his exchange and number and you’d give that to the operator, then you could talk to him even if he was hundreds of miles away.’

‘So I could stand here and talk to somebody in Birmingham or London?’

‘As long as your pennies lasted,’ the other man said.

At lunchtime she brought them out bread and cheese and cups of tea. At the end of the afternoon as they packed up their tools, the younger man explained about police calls.

‘You don’t have to put any money in. Just tell the operator you want police and she puts you straight through.’

‘To Constable Price?’

He was their local man, operating from his police house in a larger village three miles away.

‘Or any policeman. Just run to the box, pick up the telephone and they’ll come racing along as if they was at Brooklands.’

Constable Price only had a bicycle. She assumed a telephone call would bring a faster kind of police altogether. It all added to the glamour of the phone kiosk. When the men had gone she stood looking at it for a long time, went in and touched the receiver gently and reverently. It was inert on its cradle and yet she felt it buzzing with the potential of a whole world. Every day her errands around the village would take her past it. She’d slow down, touch the kiosk, sometimes go inside and touch the receiver itself, trying to find the courage to pick it up. One autumn day, she managed it. The woman’s voice at the other end, bright and metallic as a new sixpence, said ‘Hello. What number please?’ She dropped the receiver back on the cradle, heart thumping. She didn’t know anybody’s number, nobody’s in the world. But in her dreams, one day a number would come into her head and she’d say it. Then the operator would say ‘Certainly, madam,’ the way they did in the department stores in Birmingham, the phone would click and buzz and there would be somebody on the other end – London, Worcester, anywhere – who’d say how nice to hear from her and he could tell from her voice that he’d like her no end, so why didn’t he come in a car or even an aeroplane and whisk her away to a place where she could quick-time foxtrot in little pointed shoes and drink from a triangular glass under a striped umbrella? What was the point of telephones, after all, if they couldn’t do magic? So like her father with his petrol pump she waited patiently for it to happen.

‘So,’ the inspector said, ‘Miss Davitt decided after half an hour or possibly longer that all might not be well with our man in the kiosk. So she looks more closely and finds Tod Barker with the back of his head cracked open the way you’d take a spoon to your breakfast egg.’

Constable Price thought inappropriately of the good brown eggs his hens laid in their run at the back of his police house.

‘Yes, sir. Only she didn’t know it was Tod Barker, of course. She’d never seen the man before.’

‘Which isn’t surprising, because as we know the only times you’d find Tod Barker outside the East End was when he was on a racecourse or in prison. And unless I’m misinformed, there aren’t any prisons or racecourses in this neck of the woods.’

‘No, sir. He had quite a record, didn’t he? Three burglaries, two assaults, two robberies with violence and four convictions for off-course betting.’

This feat of memory from the documents he’d read earned him an approving look from the inspector. But Constable Price reminded himself that a village bobby who wanted to keep his job shouldn’t be too clever.

‘Those are just the ones they managed to make stick in court,’ the inspector said. ‘Plenty of enemies in the underworld too. Our colleagues in London weren’t surprised to hear that somebody had given Tod Barker a cranial massage with an iron bar.’

‘An iron bar, was it?’

‘So the laboratory men say. Flakes of rust in the wound.’

‘And nobody surprised?’

‘Not that he was dead, no. Not even that he was dead in a phone box. In the betting trade I gather they spend half their lives on the telephone.’

‘And we know he’d made a call from that box earlier in the day.’

‘Yes, and since they keep a record at the exchange of the numbers, we know the call was to the bookmaker he works for back in London. So no surprise there either. In fact, you might say there’s only one surprise in the whole business.’

The inspector waited for a response. Constable Price realised that he was in danger of overplaying rural slowness.

‘Why here, you mean, sir?’

‘Exactly, constable. Why – when Tod Barker regarded the countryside as something you drove through as quickly as possible to get to the next race meeting – should he be killed somewhere at the back of beyond like Tadley Gate?’

‘There’s the petrol pump, of course.’ Constable Price said it almost to himself. ‘Does that mean you get a lot of cars here?’

‘No, sir. We had two of them here on the day he was killed and I’d say two cars in one day was a record for Tadley Gate.’

When the first of the cars arrived, around midday on a fine Thursday in hay-making time, Molly was sitting at the parlour table with the accounts book open in front of her, getting on with her task of sending out bills to her father’s customers. Men’s voices came from outside and the sound of slow pneumatic wheels on the road. She jumped up, glad to be distracted, and looked out of the window. Advancing into their yard came an open-topped four-seater, sleek and green. A man with brown hair and very broad shoulders sat in the driving seat. It moved with funereal slowness because the engine wasn’t running at all. Its motive power came from two men pushing from the back. One of them was plump, middle-aged and red-faced. The other – bent over with his shoulder against the car – happened to glance up as Molly looked out of the window. He smiled when he saw her and her heart did such a jolt of shock and unbelief that it felt like a metal plate with her father’s biggest hammer coming down on it.

She thought, ‘Did I really telephone for him after all?’

Then, because she was essentially a good and practical girl, she told herself not to be a mardy ha’porth, of course she hadn’t, so stop daydreaming and get on with it. Her father hadn’t heard or seen the car because he was hammering a damaged coulter in his forge out the back. It was up to her to get into the yard and see what they wanted. As she stepped outside the two men stopped pushing and let the car come to a halt not far from the petrol pump.

‘Is there a mechanic here? Call him quickly, would you.’

It was the older, red-faced man who spoke, in a south Wales accent. The other man, the one she’d have called on the telephone if she knew he existed and had his number, straightened up and smiled at her again, rubbing his back with both hands. He was pretending that pushing the car had exhausted him but Molly knew at once from the smile and the exaggeration of his movements that he wasn’t exhausted at all, was just making a pantomime of it for her amusement. She smiled back at him. He was taller than average and maybe five years or so older than she was, with black hair, very white teeth and dark eyes that seemed more alive to her than any she’d seen before. And the smiles they exchanged were like two people saying the same thing at once. ‘Well, fancy somebody like you being here.’ But she had to turn away because the red-faced man was repeating his question loudly and urgently.

‘I’ll get my dad,’ she said, whirled away into the shadowy forge and shouted to him over he hammer blows. Davy Davitt followed her into the sunshine, still wearing his thick leather farrier’s apron and when he saw the motor car by his petrol pump his face lit up.

‘Twelve horse power, Rover, nice cars, six hundred pounds new,’ he murmured to himself. Then aloud, ‘What’s the trouble then, sir?’

‘Blessed axle gone,’ the red-faced man said. ‘These roads are an insult to motor cars, not a yard of tarmac in the last twenty miles.’

‘Come far, have you?’

‘Far enough,’ said the tall young man. ‘We started from Pontypridd.’

His voice was Welsh too, bright and dancing. The red-faced man gave him a hard look.

‘Doesn’t matter to him where we started, Sonny. Question is, can he do something so we can get where we’re going to?’

‘Where’s that then?’ Davy asked.

‘London. And we’re in a hurry.’

Even though the red-faced man’s voice was impatient, they were some of the sweetest words in the language to Davy. In seconds he was horizontal under the car, with the man bending himself double to try to see what was happening. Nobody was paying much attention to the other young man who’d been in the driving seat. He’d got out and was sitting, calm and contented in the sunshine, on the low stone wall between the house and the yard, looking at Molly. And Molly was staring enchanted at the man called Sonny because she’d just heard from his lips some of the sweetest words in the language to her.

‘Would there be anywhere here with a telephone I could use?’

Proudly she led him to the kiosk and sat on the step of the war memorial to watch. She always liked to watch, on the very rare occasions when people used the telephone, grieved by their hesitations and fumblings. Sonny was different. He didn’t pause to read the card of instructions, or drop coins on the concrete floor or fidget with doubt or embarrassment. He simply picked up the receiver and spoke into it as if it were a thing he did every day, easy as washing your hands. She saw a smile on his face and his lips moving and knew he must be giving a number to the distant operator then he must have been connected to his number because his lips were moving again though she couldn’t hear what he was saying.

‘Blessed car’s broken down, back of beyond. No sign of them though. Didn’t guess we’d be going this way.’

He was speaking to his father, who ran a boxers’ training gymnasium in Pontypridd.

‘That’s where you’re wrong, boy. They’re right behind you. Left Cardiff early this morning in a black Austin 20, heading same way as you.’

‘How did they know, then?’

‘Never mind that. Fact is, they do know. Tell Enoch. You at a garage?’

‘Blacksmith’s with a petrol pump.’

‘Can’t miss you then, can they?’

‘They can’t do anything to him, not in broad daylight.’

‘Only takes a little nudge, you know that. Elbow in wrong place, oh dear so sorry, damage done.’

‘Enoch and me wouldn’t let a flea’s elbow near him, let alone theirs.’

‘You look after our boy.’

Molly watched as he came out of the kiosk looking worried.

‘Have you had bad news?’

It didn’t strike her that she had no right to ask this of a stranger. He answered her with another question.

‘Your father good with cars, is he?’

‘Very good.’

‘We need to be moving, see? Quicker than I thought.’

She caught his urgency and they practically ran back to the yard. By then her father was out from under the car and delivering his verdict. Beam axle gone and rear axle just holding together but wouldn’t make it to London. Both of them would need unbolting and welding.

‘How long?’ the red-faced man asked.

‘Two or three hours, with luck.’

‘Make it two hours or less and, whatever your bill is, I’ll give you ten pounds on top of it.’

Davy’s jaw dropped at the prospect of more money in two hours than he usually earned in a week. Then he went under the car with a spanner and Sonny, in his good suit and shiny shoes, went under too. Davy called out to Molly to go and tell Tick to make sure the fire in the forge was hot as he could make it. Tick was the apprentice, a large and powerful sixteen-year-old. Molly found him in the forge along with the other young man who’d been in the driving seat of the car and for an angry moment thought the two of them were fighting. Then she saw it was no more than play, the man dodging and dancing on the trodden earth floor among the scraps of metal and old horse-shoes, feet moving no more than an inch or two at a time, but enough to avoid the light punches Tick was aiming at him. A furious bellow came from behind them.

‘Rooster, are you bloody mad, boy? Come away from there.’

It was the red-faced man.

‘Sorry, Uncle Enoch.’

Obediently, the young man followed him out to the yard. Molly tried to give Tick her father’s instructions but could hardly get the boy to listen. His face was shiny with excitement.

‘Did you hear what he called him? I thought he might be, then I said to myself it couldn’t be. I’d only see’d him from a good way off and he looks different in his clothes. So I put my fists up, joking like, and he…’

‘What are you saying, Tick boy?’

‘The Rhondda Rooster, that’s all. He’s only the Rhondda Rooster!’

‘What’s that?’

‘Only the next British middleweight champion, that’s all. He’ll be fighting for the title in London the day after tomorrow and the money’s on him to win it.’

‘A boxer?’

‘Then he’ll take on the Empire champion after that. Could be world champion. When I see’d him at Cardiff he won by a knockout in three rounds against a heavier man even though there was so much blood pouring down his face he could only see from one eye.’

Molly was a country girl, not squeamish.

‘If he’s as good as you say, how come he’d got so much blood on him?’

‘He’s got a glass eyebrow.’

‘A what?’

‘That’s what they call a weak spot. Hard as iron all the rest of him, only he’s got an old cut over his left eyebrow and if that opens up it pours with blood so the referee would have had to stop the fight if he hadn’t knocked the other chap out first.’

It turned out that her father had heard of the Rhondda Rooster too because he got his head out from under the car just long enough to tell Molly to make the gentlemen comfortable in the front parlour and get something to eat. She rushed round making tea in the good china pot, putting bread, cheese and cold beef on the best tablecloth. Sonny had come out from under the car by then and she was conscious all the time of his eyes on her. The Rooster’s eyes were just as admiring if she’d noticed, but he was nothing beside Sonny – shoulders and chest too broad for the cut of his suit, one ear a bit skew-whiff, big hands that he kept bunching and flexing all the time they weren’t occupied with knife and fork. Under the stern eye of the red-faced man, Uncle Enoch, he had the clumsy good manners of a schoolboy, while Sonny seemed a man of the great world. Occupied with serving them, she missed another milestone in the speeding up of life in Tadley Gate. Another stranger went into the phone kiosk and picked up the receiver. It was the first time since the kiosk was built that it had been used more than once in a day.

The new stranger was small, dark-haired, and twentyish, in a dark suit and cow-dung smeared shoes that hadn’t been designed for country walking. He looked round to see nobody was watching and slid quickly into the box as if glad of its protection from the country all around him. The number he wanted was at an East London exchange.

‘Bit of luck. Their car’s broken down.’

‘Have they seen you?’

‘Naw, we came over a hill and saw them pushing it. So we turned off before they saw us and Gribby and me followed them on foot. Bleeding miles over the fields.’

‘Where’s Gribby?’

‘Keeping watch. Trouble is, they’ve all gone inside this house at the garage place.’

‘They’ll have to come out sometime.’

‘Won’t be easy, making it look like an accident.’

‘You could pay a boy to bung a stone at him.’

‘You joking?’

‘With what I’m paying you, don’t expect jokes as well. Next news I want to hear is the fight’s called off. Understood.’

‘Understood.’

In the parlour, Uncle Enoch was restive.

‘I’m going to see how he’s doing with the car. You stay here, Sonny. Rooster can have another slice of beef if he likes but no more bread and for heaven’s sake don’t let him even sniff those pickled onions.’

There was a tangle of briars and bushes at the back of the garden, clustering around the small stone building that sheltered the earth closet. Two rowans formed an arch over the pathway between the earth closet and the house. They’d been planted in a time when people still believed they kept away witches, all of fifty years ago, by Davy Davitt’s grandfather. Davy kept threatening to cut them down but never got round to it, so they formed a useful screen for Tod and Gribby. Tod came back from making his phone call and found his partner lurking in the bushes.

‘They still inside?’

‘The Rooster and the tall one are. His trainer’s gone inside the forge place. What’s that you got?’

Tod held out his hand to show him. It was a rusty horseshoe, worn thin and sharp on one side.

‘What’s that for then? Bring the Rooster good luck?’

‘Some kind of luck.’

Molly was in the kitchen, washing up. The Rooster was shifting around on his chair in the parlour. Because they’d started so early he’d missed his training run and his internal system was out of rhythm.

‘Where’s the little house then, Sonny boy?’

‘Down the path, back of the house.’

The Rooster went down the path, under the rowan arch and into the stone building, latching the door behind him. Tod, watching from the bushes, gauged exactly the height of the Rooster’s left eyebrow against the rough stonework of the door frame. As soon as the latch clicked down he crept out and wedged the horseshoe into place between two blocks of stone, sharp side towards the privy, so that a man coming out couldn’t help but run into it. The loud sigh of satisfaction that the Rooster gave from the inside when his business was done was echoed more quietly by Tod in the bushes.

The inspector stared out of the window at Constable Price’s potato patch.

‘So Tod and Gribby were in one car and the British Middleweight champion just happened to be in the other,’ he said.

‘He wasn’t that at the time, sir. He didn’t take the title until the fight in London two days later. But yes, they broke down in the village.’

‘Going from the Rhondda to London?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And Tod and his pal were driving from Cardiff to London?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the shortest and best way from either place doesn’t go within miles of Tadley Gate, does it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So what in the world were both of them doing there?’

‘The statement from the Rooster’s uncle says he thought a country route might be calming for him.’

‘And Tod – was he doing it to calm his nerves as well?’

‘No, sir. I’d suggest that the presence of both cars in Tadley Gate was not a coincidence.’

‘So you’ve got that far too. Go on.’

‘We know Tod worked for a bookie. We know there was a great deal of money riding on the outcome of that fight. Wouldn’t the bookie want to know how the Rooster was looking, the way they watch racehorses on the gallops?’

‘So Tod and Gribby go all the way to south Wales and back to spy on him.’

‘It’s one explanation, sir.’

‘And not a bad one.’ The inspector gave him a reconsidering look. ‘You’ve got a brain, constable. If you solved this one, I’m sure you could expect promotion to somewhere quite a lot livelier than here.’

Constable Price tried not to let his alarm show. He liked his garden, his hens, his pig. His wife and children were healthy in the country air. He’d been born in a city and now devoted quite a lot of his considerable intelligence to making sure he wasn’t promoted back to one.

‘So what goes wrong?’ the inspector said. ‘Assume Tod and Gribby are spying. The Rooster’s people might be annoyed about it, but not annoyed enough to beat Tod over the head with an iron bar. And remember the Rooster’s lot haven’t a trace of a criminal record among the three of them, unless you count Sonny Nelson being fined for doing forty-two miles an hour in Llandaff.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So we come to thieves falling out, then. Gribby’s got a record even longer than Tod’s and on the evidence you collected, he drove out of the village on his own and he was in a devil of a hurry to get his petrol tank filled.’

The Rover was in the yard, with the repaired front axle bolted back in place. Sonny, Davy and Tick were carrying the rear axle from the forge, still warm from its welding. The Rooster had been forbidden to help so was back on the wall chatting to Molly who was sitting beside him but not getting anywhere with her because her attention was on Sonny. All of them were startled by the loud burping of a horn as a black Austin 20 drew up at the pump with a large man in a checked suit at the wheel. After a glance over his shoulder, Davy ignored him.

‘He’ll have to wait. Get this job seen to first.’

They put the axle down by the Rover. Uncle Enoch watched, chest heaving as if the strain of waiting had been too much for him and his face had turned grey. Sonny looked concerned and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The horn went on burping.

‘Oh, serve him first and get him out of the way,’ Sonny said. ‘We can spare a few minutes.’

Enoch looked at him doubtfully and Davy hesitated, caught between the allure of repair work and a customer for petrol. An idea struck him.

‘Molly, you know how to work the pump. Go over and see to the gentleman.’

She got up lightly from the wall and started crossing the yard, passing so close to Sonny that he caught a whiff of the perfume she’d bought herself in Birmingham and not used till then. Following his impulse he leaned towards her and said so softly under the noise of the horn that none of the others even knew he’d spoken: ‘Delay him, long as you can.’ She gave him a gleaming glance, the slightest of nods and went on across the yard to the pump. The man in the check suit was out of the car by then with the petrol cap off, quivering with impatience. The sharp smell of his sweat mingled with petrol fumes. Molly fumbled with the hinged panel at the front of the pump. The Rooster seemed disposed to go across and help her but Sonny called to him sharply.

‘Rooster, I think I left my wallet on the parlour table. Go and see, would you?’

The Rooster obligingly went back into the house. By then Davy and Tick were both under the Rover with spanners. Sonny took Enoch by the elbow and led him back into the shadows of the forge.

‘Get a move on please, miss,’ said the man with the Austin 20 to Molly. She’d managed to get the panel open but was staring at the pump mechanism inside as if she’d never seen it before. Eventually she remembered that the little wooden handle unfolded at right angles and began to wind it slowly anticlockwise to draw up the petrol. The man wanted to do it for her but she wouldn’t let him. When she’d got the first gallon pumped up she turned the handle slowly clockwise to let it down into the tank. The bronze indicator needle by the pump mechanism moved to figure one. She looked at the driver of the Austin.

‘Is that it?’

‘No, of course it’s not. Fill her right up, for heaven’s sake.’

In other circumstances Gribby would have tried flirting with her because she was undeniably a good-looking girl. Now he could hardly restrain himself from hitting her. Slowly she pumped another gallon up and down, then another, his eyes on her, willing her to hurry. He looked away from her only once and then it was because some movement at the back of his car caught his attention. He swung round and there was Sonny standing there, his hand on the big black luggage trunk. The two men’s eyes met. Sonny returned the stare for a few moments then shrugged and moved away, as if he’d been admiring the car. It took Molly the best part of ten minutes to get the indicator to the ten-gallon figure and by that time Gribby was nearly gibbering with anger. He shoved some money at her, not waiting for change, then accelerated out of the yard in a cloud of dust and exhaust. Tick shouted after him as he went, ‘Hey, your trunk’s undone.’ One of the straps round it was unbuckled and flapping. But the man at the wheel couldn’t have heard because he didn’t stop. Forty-five minutes later, with Sonny driving, the repaired Rover followed more sedately. Sonny made sure that nobody saw him touch Molly’s hand or heard his whispered ‘Thank you’.

The Rover turned on to the road past the common. ‘We’ll stop at the phone kiosk,’ Sonny said. ‘Let them know we’re on our way again.’

He slowed down as they came alongside it, almost stopped then accelerated away so clumsily that he almost stalled the engine. From the back the Rooster said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing wrong, Rooster. Just there’s somebody using it already. We’ll find another one further along.’

Sonny and Enoch exchanged glances and from there on Sonny drove so smoothly that the Rooster slept most of the way to London.

‘So Gribby drives off in a hurry,’ the inspector said. ‘Less than an hour later Rooster’s lot notice a man in a telephone kiosk. An hour or more after that, Miss Davitt finds Tod dead and her father sends the apprentice to tell you.’

‘And I got there as soon as I could,’ Constable Price said. When Tick arrived, breathless, on an old bicycle, he’d been at a farm on the far side of his own village, investigating a case of ferret stealing. His wife sent his son running for him and he cycled from there as fast as a man could go on a police bike to the telephone kiosk in Tadley Gate.

‘And judging by your report, you decided at once that whoever battered, him over the head didn’t do it in the kiosk?’

Outside Price regretted giving in to the temptation to be clever in his report, but couldn’t go back on it now.

‘There’d have been blood splashed all over the place, sir. As it was, he’d just bled down the back of his suit and onto the floor.’

‘Yes. So our assumption is that he managed to stagger to the phone kiosk from wherever Gribby hit him with the iron bar, probably intending to call for help.’

‘You think that’s what happened, sir?’

‘Speaks for itself. Then there was that trail of blood you noticed from the road to the kiosk, as if he’d dragged himself the last few yards. So they quarrel – probably over the money they’re getting paid for spying on the Rooster – Gribby bashes Tod over the head, leaves him for dead and scuttles back to London as soon as he’s got a full tank of petrol. Only Tod comes round and has just enough life left in him to make it as far as the phone kiosk but not enough to pick up the telephone.’

Constable Price thought about it in his slow rural way. ‘So that’s it then, sir?’

‘Yes, but we’re never going to pin it on Gribby unless you turn up a witness. So work on it and keep me informed.’

The inspector went back to his car – smaller and more battered than either the boxer’s or the villain’s – and headed back thankfully for the town. Constable Price went to feed his hens. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl watching a dead man in the phone kiosk.

When the Rover left her father’s yard Molly was in a world she didn’t recognise any more. Her father and Tick were tidying their tools away, pleased with their day, talking about the Rooster. The murmur of their voices, the small metallic clanks, the lingering petrol smell, should have been familiar but she felt as if she’d been put down in a foreign country. Probably a nice enough country if you got to know it, but nothing that had any connection with her. From habit, she went in the kitchen, put a saucepan of water on the stove for her father to wash, boiled a couple of eggs for his tea since their visitors had eaten everything else. But as soon as she’d finished washing up she let her feet take her towards the common and the telephone kiosk. It was the link between herself and Sonny. She didn’t believe that the combined magic of her father’s motor mania and the telephone kiosk would bring him here and let him go again as if nothing had happened. The squeeze of her hand surely meant he’d be back – and how would he let her know that if not by telephone? Her heart gave a jolt when, from a distance, she saw a man in the kiosk. But it wasn’t Sonny, nothing like him, just a smaller man in a darker suit. Nobody she recognised, but on this day of wonders another stranger more or less made no difference. She sat on the steps of the war memorial, thinking about Sonny while the shadows of a summer afternoon grew long on the grass around her. The cooling of the air made her realise that time had passed and the stranger was still there in the phone kiosk. Curiosity, then increasing alarm, made her hurry toward it.

Once Tadley Gate knew that the body was a stranger’s everybody got on with haymaking before the weather broke. When the news got out that the dead man had been a criminal from London some people in the village implied that it was the fault of the phone kiosk and the petrol pump, which would naturally attract people like that. Once the police had finished in the kiosk a woman who usually did the cleaning in chapel took it on herself to scrub and disinfect it and people went back to not using it quite normally. Davy Davitt and Tick were more interested in the Rooster’s chances for the Empire and the World titles. Constable Price sometimes discussed it with them. He’d taken to dropping in at the forge quite often these days. One day he had to go to the privy and noticed a rusty horseshoe with a sharp edge lying on the earth outside. It seemed a funny place for a horseshoe, but it was a farrier’s after all. Some of the bushes had been pushed back as if something heavy had landed there not long ago, but then you got boys fighting all over the place. Constable Price tried hard, but he couldn’t stop thinking. As for Molly, she strolled on the common within earshot of the telephone in the long evenings but apart from that got on with the cooking and accounts like any sensible girl. Then, one day when she was scrubbing a frying pan, two boys arrived running from the common with just enough breath between them to get out the news.

‘Miss, you’re wanted on the telephone.’

She dropped the pan and ran to the kiosk with her apron still on.

‘Miss Davitt?’ Sonny’s voice, distant and metallic but perfectly clear. He had to say it again before she managed to whisper a ‘yes’ into the receiver. He apologised for not telephoning before. He’d had to stay in London with the Rooster and Uncle Enoch but would be driving himself home the next day and wondered if he might call in. ‘Yes,’ she said again. For her first telephone call it was hardly a big speaking part, but it seemed to be all that was needed.

When she got back to the yard, Constable Price was there, sitting on a wall in the sun. His bicycle was upside down and her father was doing something to its chain with pliers. He was looking at a magazine, open at an advertisement for the Austin 20. He stood up when he saw her.

‘Hello, Miss Davitt. Will you stay and talk to me?’

Molly didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted to rush around shouting that Sonny had telephoned, was dropping in. But you couldn’t, of course. She sat down on the wall and Constable Price sat back down beside her.

‘Nice roomy cars, Austin 20s. Space for a good big trunk at the back.’

She nodded, still not concentrating on what he was saying.

‘There was a good big trunk on the one the man was driving, the one who filled up with petrol here. Remember? Tick noticed it wasn’t properly fastened when the man drove out, only he was in too much of a hurry to stop.’

She said nothing, but he felt something change in the air round her, as if it had suddenly gone brittle. ‘Stop now,’ he said to himself. But something was throbbing in his brain, like a motor engine with the brake on.

‘I suppose nobody happened to open the trunk while he was getting his petrol?’

‘You wouldn’t.’ She said it to the sparrows pecking in the dust. ‘Not to put in petrol.’

He noticed it wasn’t an answer, felt the brake in his mind slipping.

‘So if there’d been anything in the trunk, you couldn’t have known?’

She shook her head, still looking down.

‘Did he go anywhere near his trunk while you were putting in the petrol?’

She murmured, ‘No’.

‘Or did anybody else?’

She raised her head and looked at him. Such a look of desperation he’d only seen before in the eyes of a dog run over by a cart that he had to put out of its misery. He pulled on the mental brake, told his brain it couldn’t go along the road. If he persisted, she’d break down, tell him something he couldn’t ignore. She was a good girl, didn’t deserve trouble. He stood up.

‘Looks like your dad’s finished with my bicycle.’

He waved to her over his shoulder as he pedalled away.

Sonny came next day, in the Rover. He asked Davy if he’d be kind enough to have a look at the electrical starter, something not quite right about it. While he was working on it, Sonny and Molly strolled together in the sunshine on the common.

‘A promise I made Uncle Enoch,’ He told her. ‘I’d never say a word to anybody, long as I lived, just one exception. If there was a girl I liked, I might have to tell her. If I could trust her, that is.’

‘You can trust me.’

‘I know. The Rooster matters to Enoch more than all the world. Anything threatening him, he goes mad. And it was my fault, partly. If I’d done what he told me and not let the Rooster out of my sight, they wouldn’t have had their chance. When he came back to the parlour and I told him the Rooster was down at the little house on his own he rushed straight down there, just in time. A second later and the Rooster would have walked right into it. The wickedness of it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we couldn’t let the Rooster know. It would have unsettled him. But we couldn’t leave the body there in the bushes because it might have caused trouble for you and your dad. So when I saw the other one driving into your yard, bold as brass, it came to me that if we put it in his trunk it would serve both of them right. And you played up to me. Without a word. Just trusted me.’

‘Yes.’

As they walked, the back of his hand brushed lightly against hers.

‘Only it went wrong, you see? He must have noticed the trunk strap flapping just after he drove out of your yard. So when he looked in there and saw what he saw, all he could do was dump it in the phone kiosk. Only it happened to be you that found him. I’m sorry about that.’

Their hands met palm to palm and stayed together.

‘It’s all right,’ she said.

Later, when they’d been married for some time and Sonny was doing well in London as a boxing promoter, she had a telephone in her own home and talked to her friends on it nearly every day. Sonny was driving a Daimler by then with plenty of room at the back for the children and they sometimes used it to pop down to Tadley Gate, where her father had put up a proper garage sign and often filled up as many as half a dozen cars a day on summer weekends. Sometime between one visit and the next the Post Office took away Kiosk One and replaced it with a more imposing model, all bright red paint and glass panels. They gave it a glance as they drove past.