‘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.