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.’