“Mrs. Bentley Haskell.” The man in the raincoat cut a path through the crowd. He wore a hat with the brim pulled low and had greasy black sideburns. “I’ve been sent to fetch you down to the station to answer a couple more questions about the murder.” He reached into an upper pocket, flashed a leatherbound square of cardboard and intoned, “Homicide. We’d like you to bring your mother-in-law with you”-he tucked the folder away-“to make things a bit more comfortable for you.”
I didn’t ask how he knew I had a mother-in-law and that Magdalene was she. He had a bulge in his raincoat pocket that looked like it could be a gun, and his teeth were rotten. I played along.
“We’ll… we’ll have to take my husband home first. He’s had a cooking accident.” I moved in with agonising nonchalance to the serving cart and reached for Ben’s hand. Thank heavens, it felt alive. Was that funny smell chloroform?
Dr. Bordeaux’s voice chilled the back of my neck. “No need for that, Mrs. Haskell. You go along with the policeman and I will take-”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” snapped Magdalene, “because I won’t budge from here without my son!”
The Raincoat Man swaggered toward me, hand in his pocket. “You’d best get your husband rolling, Mrs. Haskell. As for you, Doc, I’d start giving first aid to some of the others here.”
Butler! It had to be he, playing his part brilliantly. I had to crush down my elation, to prevent it bubbling out of my throat in hysterical laughter.
“Excuse me.” I addressed Mrs. Bottomly’s chins, my hands gripping the handle of the cart. “Coming, Magdalene?” The horrid faces of these women! Mrs. Parsnip backed away from me, her eyes immobile.
“Sorry everything went so wrong,” I babbled, thinking it prudent to pretend a kind of normalcy, but the possible interpretations of my words abruptly sobered me.
The menace in the hall had been so strong that I had been afraid that of itself it might prevent our leaving; once outside, I clung to Ben’s hand, trembling. We stood on the gravel path, the elms casting green shadows over our faces. A bee buzzed close to my ear. “What now?” I asked.
The Raincoat Man withdrew his hand from his pocket and with it a gun. He rubbed the barrel against the bridge of his nose, then pressed it against the base of my throat. “We take your car, sweetheart, and we drive away from the village.”
“So we aren’t going to the police station?” Magdalene pulled her hat down over her ears.
“Not within a mile.” He drew the gun back a few inches. The rotten teeth were very much in evidence. “Sorry, old woman, but you don’t get to drive down busy streets and toss a shoe out the window with a message inside.”
Something was seriously wrong with his speech. Not a wink, not a word that he was Butler. Ben made a grunting noise and his arm lolled off the cart. I prayed he wouldn’t wake up. This rescue was deteriorating with every step. Silently, Magdalene got into the back seat of the Heinz. The Raincoat Man watched with a sardonic smirk as I manoeuvered Ben, by means of a modified fireman’s carry, alongside her.
“Well, Reggie Patterson,” my mother-in-law snipped. “I must say this is a lot better than knowing you were out there somewhere, watching. You nasty boy. And don’t go taking on airs thinking I’m frightened. What, me frightened of anyone as stupid as you? I remember well when you used to come and collect your father’s rents. It was said up and down the street that all his money couldn’t do for you what nature hadn’t. You’re stupid and a coward!”
“No, I ain’t.”
Magdalene’s lips ruched into a smile. “Those that were short on the rent put their dogs out the minute they saw you coming-even Mrs. Rose with her Pekingese. And those who didn’t have dogs had their kiddies bow-wow at the window. My Ben”-she looked lovingly at the dark head on her lap-“he used to feel he’d missed out because we weren’t on your rent books and he didn’t get to send you scampering with your tail between your legs.”
“Yeah,” came a snicker. “Benny boy stopped laughing, didn’t he, when I shut him in the tater bin?”
The gun muzzle rested chill against my neck as I slid into the driver’s seat. The Raincoat Man was the son of the wicked landlord of Crown Street and Magdalene was being kidnapped, with Ben and myself going along for the ride. The Raincoat Man got into the passenger seat.
“Move it, sister.”
Please, Heinz, I prayed, do what you do best: stall.
While I fumbled with the key, Magdalene spoke. “I’d like to know, Reggie, why you never showed after luring me to the churchyard at dead of night?” She gave a sarcastic little laugh. “Did something better turn up?”
The damn motor throbbed to life.
Reggie pulled the brim of his hat low over his mean little eyes and stuck a home-rolled cigarette between his lips. “I dunno what the bleedin’ hell you’re talking about, which is because you’s trying to confuse me. But it ain’t gonna work.” He twisted around and tapped ash in Magdalene’s general vicinity. “I tell you I ain’t stupid. Me dad’s gonna get that through his skull when I pull this baby off.” He tapped his chest with the gun.
We were through the churchyard gates, the stupid Heinz purring along as if newly minted from the factory. The breeze kept blowing my hair in my eyes. “Dad was all for putting the squeeze on old man Haskell when we got the chance to sell out all them scum-bag houses on Crown Street for a dozen times what they was worth. Some blokes wanted to tear them down and build a shopping arcade, but it was all nixed because that lousy little Shylock you’re married to wouldn’t part with his shop. The trouble with Dad is he don’t think big. He made a couple of threatening phone calls and then got the wind up his pants when your coloured shop assistant rung back and told him, in that plummy voice of his-just like he was spouting poetry, to pack it in. Dad carried on like he’d been fixed with the evil eye.”
Reggie shoved the cigarette to one side of his mouth and spat out the window. “Me, I was all for torching the shop but Dad said if I did, we was through. The arcade boys would smell a rat and call the whole deal off. It was me, the numbskull, who could see what he couldn’t, that it didn’t do no good threatening old man Haskell himself. The way to get to him was through his old lady. So I starts hanging about, watching you, letting him know that if he didn’t sign on the dotted line his missus was like to disappear.”
I stared straight ahead. “She disappeared all right, but at Mr. Haskell’s instigation. You dithered too long, Mr. Patterson. My guess is that for all your brave talk, you were afraid of Paris, the Magnificent, afraid that he might step on you and not notice.”
“No, I ain’t.” Reggie’s eyes disappeared between lash-less folds. “And I ain’t afraid of no dogs.” A scowl slid over his face like slime. “I just don’t like the way they bark and set up the alarm. And in that buggering big house of yours, someone could creep up behind me and I’d have wasted me time.”
I felt better but I was worried about Ben. I had to stay alive. I must take care of him. Keep Reggie talking. Try to get him to see the futility of his schemes. We were approaching The Aviary; there was the low buff wall, the gate, and the arthritic tree with its crippled branches supporting a huge bird’s nest. But no sign of Mr. Digby.
“I suppose,” I said to Reggie, “your plan is to detain us until my father-in-law agrees to sell his shop to you and your father. But where does that really get you? The minute we are free he can cancel the agreement and stroll down to the police station.”
Reggie turned a blackened smile on me. “No, he won’t. Not if he’s given his bleedin’ word not to. Ain’t it known from Crown Street to Buckingham Palace”-he flicked more ash at Magdalene-“that old man Haskell never breaks his word, not even if it breaks his heart?”