‘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.’