The insurance man suggested that the house might have gone up like a box of matches due to faulty wiring. I offered neither denial nor comment, on the advice of Bill, who said that if I fell into an argument they might try to do me down. He was a man of the world in more ways than me, and though nothing had been wrong with the electrics, because I’d had the place rewired on buying it, I did as he said, and kept shtum. So I got a fair deal for the restoration.
The house wasn’t a total wreck, in any case. Within a year the floors had been rebuilt, the roof replaced, chimneys rebricked, and decorations done. Bill’s forceful bonhomie with the builders, as well as my sharp eye, and the fact that I worked harder than ever in my life, denied them any opportunity to bodge or skive, so that it came back to home and beauty stage by stage, not quite Buckingham Palace, as Bill had urged, but a solid and comfortable replica worth keeping for life, which was all I wanted. How could I lose my affection for a place reborn from such a memorable fire?
Clegg, Dismal and I pigged it meantime in the signal box, while Bill bought a bivouac tent and camped well away from the building site. As blissful as a sandboy, he whistled and sang all day long, making fires of charred wood collected from the surroundings to boil and fry his meals on. He couldn’t have had such a good time since Normandy, and only a few artillery shells whistling over would have made him more at home.
As soon as the fire had gone down we put together a long unsigned letter to Scotland Yard, saying that if they called at a certain house in Ealing they would find several hundredweight of hard drugs stashed away. They might visit Spleen Manor, Peppercorn Cottage, and Doggerel Bank as well, where incriminating powders might also be found. Motoring to Oxford to drop our missive in the box, I wasn’t sufficiently optimistic to suppose such narking would do the trick.
But it did. Those in high places thought it time that Moggerhanger’s long run was fullstopped. Kenny Dukes and his two pals, resting and gloating at home base from their firebug endeavours were, to our delight, pulled in.
Apart from the establishment at Ealing simultaneous descents were made on Moggerhanger’s other depots. Ronald Delphick was dragged screaming from his Yorkshire retreat with hurriedly concealed powder spilling from his armpits.
Moggerhanger at home swore he knew nothing about drugs even when shown clear evidence, claiming — a villain to the end — that his employees had been storing the disgraceful material without his knowledge. The police went about their work as if they’d wanted to nail him for years, but had only been waiting for a convincing tip-off, and all but took the settlement to pieces, finding tons of hard stuff in an underground room which even I hadn’t known to exist.
Chief Inspector Lanthorn must have turned in his grave, or maybe two, because he would never have been satisfied with one. My only regret was that he hadn’t been alive to get corralled into the fiasco, though I mentioned in the letter that the goings on of his son at a certain Channel port should be investigated as well.
After the trial Bill shouldered a crate of champagne up the signal box steps, and Clegg laid out a celebratory meal on a pair of packing cases pushed together. A double tin of Bogie made up Dismal’s menu and, Clegg chopping a few sprigs of parsley over it, he gobbled the mess with disgraceful speed. The champagne poured into a saucer was tongued into his gut so greedily that in a private incarnation he must have been none other than Champagne Charlie, which caused us to wonder about his future.
Not all the barristers of London Town could save Moggerhanger from fifteen years in jail and losing his seat in the House of Lords.
“Getting sent down served him right.” Bill refilled our glasses. “But I don’t think he should have had his peerage taken away. After all, the ancestors of everybody in that place must have done worse to get their titles. Compared to them, Moggerhanger was lily-white.”
While enough funds from other enterprises, not to mention off-shore accounts, would secure Moggerhanger a comfortable retirement on a West Country estate, he could never get back into the same drug business, should he want to make up some of his losses, because the Green Toe Gang took all of the trade, though they soon ceased to do well against black gangs stepping in from the old Empire who were too vicious to interfere with. Bill and I drank to our having got out in time.
Blaskin, who called soon after the fire, was so horrified at our primitive accommodation that he lodged a few nights at a hotel in Cambridge. He asked for all the details of Moggerhanger’s conviction, to put in his next book, and wanted to know about my part in it. Never one to let good material go to waste, he nevertheless scoffed at the style of what I had already pencilled under the never clear enough light from the storm lamps. After running riotous red marks through every paragraph he added a few lines of his own, which angered me so much I told him to back off. “My stuff is easily as good as the crap you turn out, and a lot better than your Sidney Bloods.”
He chided me for imagining that novelists had to have their own way in everything, and cried like pampered children if they didn’t get it. “We don’t want it to be known that there are two of us in the world,” he said. “Why should I leave the writing of such a book to a tyro like you? I want it come out in my name, not yours.”
His horse laugh told me it was impossible for his hand not to go into reflex action at the sight of my scribble, so I capitulated.
Bill left after the house was finished, and I was sorry to see him go, waving for as long as he could see me on the platform. Dismal resumed his duties as guard dog, and Clegg, who could never be still, kept the station tidy and the surroundings so thoroughly up to scratch I wondered whether he didn’t go out during the night to spoil what had been done in daylight.
After I was reinstalled in the house Sophie would come up one weekend and Frances the next. Both knew of the arrangement, and neither minded because, after all, the sixties had long since been and gone. Frances twigged where I was and who I was with, but knew I would always love her, and so I do. Sister Sophie still wasn’t able to make the separation from her husband, since he could never decide to let her go. Some couples are like that.
Back from a walk across the fields one afternoon I spotted my fourteen-year-old daughter Sam halfway up the signal box steps, looking lively and lovely in an electric blue top and green slacks, which rig I supposed to be the day’s fashion for young girls in Nottingham. She ran down two at a time: “Dad!”
“How did you get here?” She took my hand on walking across the line. “It’s marvellous to see you,” I said, when in truth I had been too busy the last month or two to think of her. “But a bit of a shock, all the same.”
“You live in a railway station — how fab! And that cuddly big dog up there. He was standing up trying to move the levers, so I helped him, and then he licked my face all over.”
“We call him Dismal.” She’d had little to eat that day, so I sat her at the kitchen table, while Clegg cooked up a platter of ham and eggs, with little tomatoes straight from the vine.
“I’ve been planning to come here for years and years. As soon as I saw you that time I knew you had to be my father. I nicked your address from mam’s purse, then looked on a map to see where it was.”
She was my daughter right enough. “Does Claudine know you’ve come here?”
She gargoyled, though it still didn’t mar her prettiness. “I don’t know. I hate the rotten cow.” She played with the bangle on her arm. “She hates me, and always has. She’s got a boyfriend now. He’s a real creep. They do it to each other all the time. I caught them at it last week when I came home early from school. It was so disgusting I threw up in the bathroom. I’ll never do that with anybody.”