Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘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.’

‘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.