The Great Wash Read online

“Even so, it must occur even to you that he wouldn’t put on his gloves until after he had buckled his shoes, dopey. In burglary, gloves are a last-minute affair.”

  “The gyppos won’t talk, of course,” I said.

  “No more than Chinamen,” said George Oaks.

  “But the shoe,” I said, “the shoe, surely, must be a giveaway. A man can’t get very far on half a pair of shoes, can he? It seems to me that this man must have had some kind of hideout close by—otherwise he’d have risked anything rather than leave that shoe behind. He’d even have taken a chance on tangling with Bollard, who, if I know the look of a man, must be like fifteen stone of hard rubber to tackle. He’d know that inside half an hour the whole countryside would be looking for a man with one shoe—and so would every policeman on every road for miles around. Am I right, George?”

  “Of course, of course, Albert,” said George Oaks, impatiently. “That’s plain as print. . . . The gyppos they caught are a pair of brothers named Hearn, out of an encampment down in the dell on Oversmith’s land. The police will have been down there hours ago: they’ll meet with blank faces, of course; the Hearns are better known as the ‘Black Brothers’——”

  “—They’ve been in trouble before,” I said.

  “Oh, never mind about that! As for the man with the shoe, or without the shoe, I’ve advised Bollard to keep an eye on Sir Peter Oversmith’s house.”

  I said: “A fat lot of good that’ll do! Oversmith is a Justice of the Peace and the local Squire—you’d never get your nose inside his house unless you had a direct invitation except within the last letter of the law, and not then without the devil to pay.”

  “Albert, I know that. There will be the devil to pay. That’s exactly what I want, don’t you see? As far as I am concerned, all this fits in with the Design, as I see it. Like this—” George Oaks made a ring with thumb and forefinger. “Now, let’s get the formalities over and done with, and catch the eight-fifteen train to Charing Cross . . . And when so sad thou canst not sadder, Cry, and upon thy so sore loss, Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, Stretch’d between Heaven and Charing Cross, eh? Come now . . .”

  In New York the garbage collectors ride about the city in dirty white trucks in which is embodied some toothy mechanism designed to chew up everything and spit it, masticated, into a dark tank. Irreparably smashed trunks, bean tins, chicken bones, rags, broken bottles, dead flowers, potato-salad cartons, bolts of stained ticking and kapok that once were mattresses, millions of cigarette ends, burnt stews, sprouting onions, dead cats, electric light bulbs, and the remains of demolished radios—all go into this elaborate dust cart which, at the touch of a dustman’s hand on a lever, gives out a vibrant growling noise that gets into your bones and makes coherent thought impossible, while it licks and gnashes and gulps until the bewildering detritus of a hundred houses lies quiet and compact, dun-coloured and dense . . . It may go to fill in a swamp to build a viaduct, or level a runway from which huge winged machines may take off for the Spice Islands . . . You hope so. Your reasoning mind in abeyance, you wait until the noise has ceased, and then you take in your garbage pail and peel more potatoes. . . .

  The insistent buzzing in my muddled head called to mind this image. “Come downstairs and let’s get it over with,” I said.

  But apart from being officially informed of the breaking and entering at my place, there was nothing to be got over with, so we went back to the house. Hobson was on guard outside, keeping away a gang of dangerous-looking small boys armed with cap pistols, and led by the notorious girl with pink pigtails, who brandished a hockey stick and directed operations: they had tied up a fat boy and were putting him into a little truck preparatory to taking him for a ride. The parson’s youngest son, a smooth-faced killer of eleven years (the girl was supposed to be his Moll), had one of those trick daggers with a disappearing blade, with which he repeatedly stabbed the fat boy in the abdomen, while he chewed a plug of liquorice and practised spitting brown at the same time.

  “If they’re like this before breakfast, can you imagine what they’re like by teatime?” said Hobson, cringing as a white-headed ten-year-old threatened him with a broken flit-spray. “. . . Dicky Queen, you put that down—I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, looking as if he was about to be violently sick, which meant to say that he intended to look fierce. “. . . They learn it in picture palaces, Mr. Kemp.”

  Meanwhile, four panting children, one of them wearing an Air Force cap, were rolling up a rusty oil drum, screaming: “We got an atom bomb!” and “Blow the bugger back to Japan!”

  “Better get them to untie that boy,” said George Oaks, “they’ll probably soak him in petrol and set light to him; I wouldn’t put it past them.” He threw the girl half-a-crown. “Ransom money. Now hop to it.”

  She complained: “We haven’t written a ransom note yet!” But then a woman appeared and carried her off, whereupon the mob dispersed.

  Sergeant Bollard was in the sitting-room, drinking a cup of tea. He was wearing two black eyes with ineffable dignity; that beam must have caught him just over the bridge of the nose. One of his knuckles was bound round with sticking plaster; it was safe to assume that one of the Black Brothers must be gap-toothed this morning. He said: “. . . Nothing missing, sir, and no damage done. They forced the window-catch of the little spare room. If it hadn’t been for that beam we’d have got the lot . . . My word, sir, they seasoned their oak pretty well in the olden days, didn’t they?” He rubbed his head.

  “Made inquiries at Oversmith Hall yet?” Oaks asked.

  “Don’t you worry about that, sir,” said Bollard, smoothly. “I’ve been in touch with the Chief Inspector, and I have my instructions.”

  “Mr. Kemp and I are going to town for the day,” said George Oaks. “I’ve got an article to finish. If you want me, you can get me through the office, or at my flat—Halfacre knows the address, 29 Chalcot Terrace, Earl’s Court . . . That’ll be my first port of call, I think. You know what? I want first and foremost to change all my clothes—I can still feel the slime of that well on me.”

  “All right, sir, I’ll tell him that.” Bollard looked at his watch. “I suppose you’ll be catching the eight-fifteen, Mr. Kemp?”

  “That’s right,” I said, “and if Halfacre wants me, I’ll be with Mr. Oaks most of the time. In any case I’ll be back here tonight. I can rely on you to lock the place up? You can leave the keys with Mr. Titmouse at the Piebald Horse, if you like.”

  “Definitely, Mr. Kemp,” said Sergeant Bollard.

  “Then, speaking of changing, George,” I said, “I’ll put on a fresh shirt, and we’ll be off.”

  It struck me that this, somehow, was an occasion for dressing up. I put on a silk shirt and a sober blue flannel suit. The acoustics of these old houses are remarkable—George Oaks’s stage-whisper seemed to hiss through every crack as he said: “Kemp keeps some Scotch in the linen press, under some spare blankets . . .” Bollard replied: “Yes, Mr. Oaks, and he also leaves his money lying about, too. Happy-go-lucky.”

  I remembered then a little cache of fifty new pound notes in my handkerchief drawer, left over from the bracing days of the blitzes, when anything might happen and it was not a bad idea to keep a little ready money about the house . . . when Silly Sussex became a forest of unlicensed shotguns, and farmers’ wives kept extra kettles of water boiling to throw into the faces of the Enemy if he landed (in my neighbourhood, the only recorded case of the use of a kettle of boiling water against an invader was the case of old Mrs. Lupin versus the Luftwaffe: she caught a shot-down bomber pilot with a fractured thigh among her marigolds, and made him a cup of tea, and stood over him with the kettle until the Home Guard came) . . . when law-abiding day labourers displayed a mysterious knowledge of the countryside by night, and Mr. Shepard, the shepherd, who saw Kronje captured, came out with a suspiciously well-oiled Colt’s Nav
y revolver. . . . The whole countryside seemed to whisper with the unsheathing of concealed weapons then. A certain respectable umbrella shop in Piccadilly filled its windows with life-preservers of all kinds, from oaken clubs studded with hob-nails and loaded with lead to neat little jaw-breakers designed to slip under a lady’s garter. On my first forty-eight hours leave, I went into this shop and spent forty shillings on a most elegant cosh, or blackjack, of whalebone weighted at both ends with lead and covered with plaited strips of kangaroo hide. The shopman politely assured me that this instrument, properly used, would shatter even a Nazi skull with a flick of the wrist. I settled for the cosh before he sold me a Toledo rapier concealed in a guardsman’s ash-plant; and, having the thing, felt silly, and hid it under my civilian things.

  Now I put it in my inside breast pocket with the money. “No sense of values; easy come, easy go . . . Say when,” said George Oaks. Sergeant Bollard said: “Not for me, if you don’t mind.” And then I hurried downstairs.

  On the way to the station, George Oaks said: “A horse to a hen, Bollard is on the phone now, so that someone’ll be inconspicuously around to trail us from Charing Cross.”

  “You asked for it, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Yes, yes, Albert—but not just yet, not too soon! Therefore, we’ll change lines at the Junction, so that instead of arriving at Charing Cross at ten-eight we’ll presumably come into Victoria about twenty-five to eleven.”

  “The idea being to duck Halfacre, I take it,” I said. “I thought you’d seen enough of the man by now not to underestimate his intelligence. He knows you’re hiding something from him and want to keep out of his way for a bit. I ask you, George, won’t he put himself in your shoes, and be all set to trail you from Victoria, therefore?”

  “Albert, Halfacre goes in for the Double Obvious stuff. He will say to himself: ‘George tells Bollard that he’s catching the eight-fifteen to Charing Cross. Knowing full well that I don’t want him out of my sight just yet. George knows I expect him to hop off and switch trains at the Junction so that I’ll have someone keeping an eye out for him at Victoria. So I’ll have a man at Charing Cross—because it would be just like George to double back again. And, knowing George as I do to be as tricky as a wagon-load of monkeys, why, to be on the safe side I’ll have men posted at both Charing Cross and Victoria.’ ”

  I said: “Then what’s your idea?”

  “Simply,” said George Oaks, “we’ll get off the train at the Junction and take a taxi.”

  “Make this clear,” I said. “Forgive me, but I don’t understand. Your whole aim has been to have Chatterton trail us, and Halfacre trail Chatterton. And now you go to the most ridiculous lengths to throw them both off the scent you’ve so carefully laid down! Where is the sense in all this?”

  “Oh, you great baby!” said George Oaks. “You surely must know that if both Chatterton and Halfacre are looking for us, which they surely will be, it can’t be more than a matter of hours before one or the other catches up with us? A matter of hours, Albert, hours—that’s what I’m playing for, a matter of just a few hours alone with Ohm Robertson. Of all the men I dare approach in confidence, Ohm Robertson alone on God’s green earth can tell us what we’ve simply got to know. See?”

  “Will Ohm Robertson see us?”

  “Yes, Albert, he will. We’re old comrades. In 1915, when the War Office asked for men of science to help fight the German gas offensive, Ohm Robertson—the youngest professor ever to hold a Chair in an English university, offered himself. . . . Some apothecary’s clerk who happened to be a lieutenant gave Ohm Robertson chlorine cylinders to carry. He was browned off, Albert, cheesed off. I cheered him up by——”

  “—You poked him in the ribs and quoted Shakespeare, saying, ‘This is more important,’ I bet.”

  “As a matter of fact, I hummed him the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, playing an obbligato on a plum-and-apple jam tin.”

  “Which cheered him up, no doubt?”

  “It took his mind off things. We became good friends. We’ve met many times since, Albert. Ohm is a great scientist, and a good man; pure and simple—pure with the purity and simple with the simplicity of a wonder-child. He——”

  “—Here comes Chatterton,” I said.

  A suave, sweet-running Lagonda pulled up abreast of us with no more noise than a billiard ball makes when it bounces off two cushions. The man at the wheel was young, with a pale, compressed face. He was dressed like an officer’s servant in a high-buttoned single-breasted blue serge suit, a round-cornered stiff collar, a regimental tie, and a bowler hat. Major Chatterton, in the back seat, was elegant in pearl-grey. “Good-morning!” he said, leaning out. “Want a lift?”

  “Catching a train,” said George Oaks. “Going to London.”

  “Perfect bloody bore, isn’t it? So am I. Want a ride?”

  George Oaks said: “A nice day for it, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Quicker by road,” said Chatterton, patting the shiny black door of the car. “Care to try it and see? She’s a beauty.”

  “Bet you an even fiver my train beats your bus to Charing Cross, starting even at eight-fifteen,” said George Oaks.

  “That’s a bet. I’ll be in the lounge of the Charing Cross Hotel at a quarter to ten. But I thought you’d come down for the week-end,” said Chatterton.

  “Who, me? I work for a living. I was under the impression that you were down here for a bit of shooting.”

  “So I was, George, but the Kad wants me, and I must be about my master’s business. It’s always like that. . . . I hear you had a bit more trouble at your place last night, Kemp.”

  “Bit of a burglary,” I said.

  “Oh, hard luck! They didn’t take anything much, I hope?”

  “They were only gyppos on the prowl,” I said. “Police caught them. No harm done.”

  “Oh, good for you. Those gypsies are an infernal nuisance . . . Well, if you’re sure you won’t come, that’s a bet, George. I’ll be drinking a cup of coffee in the Charing Cross Hotel by the time you arrive.” I could hear the train whistling in the distance. “So long, then. I’ll see the train out, and then we’ll start. Got that, Powell?” The chauffeur nodded. “Have your fiver ready, George!”

  So we walked on to the platform. “Better yet, better yet,” said George Oaks, prodding me. “This means that Chatterton will be at Charing Cross, and one or two of his men at Victoria. What do you think of that chauffeur-valet of his?”

  “A gentleman’s gentleman,” I said.

  “No, that one was brought up to be a gentleman, God save the mark! Name of Mungo-Mitchell, if you please; top-drawer, Albert, upper crust. His sister, Deborah, sold her favours (if you know what I mean) to the Free French for smuggled perfume which she sold on the black market. There’s bad blood in that family. If you lifted up that fellow’s shirt you’d see white scars on his back: in 1937 he got three years and eighteen strokes of the ‘Cat’ for robbery with violence—broke a jeweller’s jaw with a knuckle-duster in Imperial Palace Court Hotel and nearly got away with ten thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds. A wrong ’un, bad to the backbone, that one. He doesn’t know me, but I know him; I was in Bow Street police court when he was charged. He’ll end up one of these fine mornings with a nasty knot under his right ear, he will. A Mayfair man, a night-club man, a playboy sans loy, sans foy, sans joy. Oh, he’ll dance, he’ll dance—on nothing, Albert, to the tolling of a big dark bell! . . . Powell, he calls himself, does he? I lay you thirty-three to one that he owes Bollard a shoe; and he’ll pay, Albert, he’ll pay. Never turn your back to that one in a lonely street, old friend; he’s deadly poison. But it’s excellent that this should be as it is; Bollard will have his prints, and the Yard will have him up for inquiry inside thirty-four hours.”

  “He’s sure to have an alibi,” I said.
r />   “I daresay, and a good alibi, too—somebody stole his shoes, very likely, and both Oversmith and Chatterton will swear to that.”

  “Is Oversmith also involved, do you think?” I asked. “I mean to say, Oversmith is such an unmitigated old idiot.”

  “I know he is. That is why he’s involved, don’t you see . . . Any new movement, Albert, must in the last analysis fatten on unhappiness. I defy you to name any movement in history that didn’t get its first strength from the anger, the misery, the hunger, the boredom, the hate, and the bitterness of its first followers. True love doesn’t move—it has arrived. Love knows no fear; it inspires nothing but bliss which can’t be communicated. Only discontent is easily communicable. The bitterest kind of discontent is not the discontent of the man who has nothing but his chains to lose and all the world to gain. The bitterest discontent is that of the man who has something and fears to lose it—or who, having had something and lost it, wants it back with interest. Oversmith thinks he’s lost something—his ancient feudal rights. He hates the rigour of the laws that he upholds as Justice of the Peace. He doesn’t want justice, and he doesn’t want peace—he wants to be a bold bad baron, like his ancestors, and I tell you that the fact that a ditch-digger can sue him for assault and battery keeps him in a state of bloody rage. You know, I suppose, that he came perilously near Brixton Prison in 1941 because of his Fascist tendencies? Fascist, my foot! What does that wild pig know of anything but Sir Peter Oversmith? All he wants is the right to rob a Jew, flog a merchant, swindle a creditor, hang a peasant——”

  “—Want some tickets, Mr. Kemp?” said the station-master, who is also the ticket collector and porter.

  “Two first class to London,” I said, and he gave me two third-class tickets, saying, for the hundredth time: “No sense paying first class, sir. Have third class, and get in a first-class carriage. If the inspector comes round, you can always pay the difference, can’t you? If it works once in ten times, it shows a profit, bless your heart. Old Mrs. Hawthorne has been travelling first class, bundles and all, for twenty years, and only once did the inspector demand excess—and she larruped him to rights.”