Josephine Tey - The Singing Sands

‘But he said: “On what?”’ said that voice in him.

‘All right , he said: “On what?”! A fine world it would be if one was going to be suspected, if one was going to be judged, by every unconsidered remark.’

The Commissioner had once said to him: ‘You have the most priceless of all attributes for your job, and that is flair. But don’t let it ride you, Grant. Don’t let your imagination take hold. Keep it your servant.’

He had been in danger of letting his flair bolt with him. He must take a pull on himself.

He would go back to where he was before he saw Lloyd. Back to the company of Bill Kenrick. Back from wild imaginings to fact. Hard, bare, uncompromising fact.

He looked across at Tad, nose to paper and pursuing his pen across the page with it as a terrier noses a spider across a floor.

‘How was your milk-bar lady?’

‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Tad, absent-minded and not lifting his glance from his handiwork.

‘Taking her out again?’

‘Uh-huh. Meeting her tonight.’

‘Think she will do as a steady?’

‘She might,’ Tad said, and then as he became aware of this unusual interest he looked up and said: ‘What’s this in aid of?’

‘I’m thinking of deserting you for a day or two, and I’d like to know that you won’t be bored if left to your own devices.’

‘Oh. Oh, no; I’ll be all right. It’s time you took some time off to attend to your own affairs, I guess. After all, this is no trouble of yours. You’ve done far too much as it is.’

‘I’m not taking time off. I’m planning to fly over and see Charles Martin’s people.’

‘People?’

‘His family. They live just outside Marseilles.’

Tad’s face, which had looked for a moment like a lost child’s, grew animated again.

‘What do you reckon to get from them?’

‘I’m not doing any reckoning. I’m just beginning from the other end. We’ve come to a blank wall where Bill Kenrick is concerned—unless his hypothetical girl-friend answers that advertisement and that won’t be for two days at the very least—so we’ll try the Charles Martin end and where we get from there.’

‘Fine. What about me coming with you?’

‘I think not, Tad. I think you had better stay here and be O.C. the Press. See that all these are inserted and pick up any answers.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Tad said in a resigned way. ‘But I sure would like to see Marseilles.’

‘It’s not a bit the way you picture it,’ Grant said, amused.

‘How do you know how I picture it?’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose I can sit on a stool and look at Daphne. What funny names girls have in this neck of the woods. It’s a bit draughty, but I can count up the number of times people say thank-you for doing other people service.’

‘If it’s iniquity you’re looking for you’ll find as much on a Leicester Square pavement as you will on the Cannebière.’

‘Maybe, but I like my iniquity with some ooh-la-la in it.’

‘Hasn’t Daphne got any ooh-la-la?’

‘No. Daphne’s very la-di-da. I have an awful suspicion that she wears woollen underwear.’

‘She would need it in a milk-bar in Leicester Square in April. She sounds a nice girl.’

‘Oh, she’s fine, fine. But don’t you stay too long away, or the wolf in me will prove too strong and I’ll take the first plane out to Marseilles to join you. When do you plan to go?’

‘Tomorrow morning, if I can get a seat. Move over and let me reach the telephone. If I get an early-morning service I can, with a piece of luck, get back the following day. If not, then Friday at the latest. How did you get on with Richards?’

‘Oh, we’re great buddies. But I’m a bit disillusioned.’

‘About what?’

‘About the possibilities of the trade.’

‘Doesn’t it pay?’

‘I expect it pays off in coin but not any other way, take it from me. All you can see from outside a window, believe it or not, is your own reflection in the glass. What are the names of those papers you want me to address these things to?’

Grant gave him the names of the six newspapers with the largest circulations, and sent him away with his blessing to employ his time as he saw fit until they met again.

‘I certainly wish I was going with you,’ Tad said once more as he was leaving, and Grant wondered if seeing the South of France as one big honky-tonk was any more absurd than seeing it as mimosa. Which was what it was to him.

‘France!’ said Mrs Tinker. ‘When you’ve only just come back from foreign parts!’

‘The Highlands may be foreign parts, but the South of France is merely an extension of England.’

‘It’s a very expensive extension, I’ve ’eard. Roonous. When was you expectin’ to be back? I got a loverly chicken from Carr’s for you.’

‘The day after tomorrow, I hope. Friday at the latest.’

‘Oh, then it’ll keep. Was you wantin’ to be called earlier tomorrow mornin’, then?’

‘I’ll be away before you come in, I think. So you can have a late morning tomorrow.’

‘A late mornin’ wouldn’t suit Tinker, it wouldn’t. But I’ll get me shoppin’ done before I come in. Now you see and take care of yerself. No burning the candle at both ends and comin’ back lookin’ no better than when you went away to Scotland in the beginnin’. I ’ope it keeps fine for you!’

Fine indeed, Grant thought, looking down at the map of France next morning. From that height on this crystal morning it was not a thing of earth and water and crops. It was a small jewelled pattern set in a lapis-lazuli sea; a Fabergé creation. Not much wonder that flyers as a species had a detached attitude to the world. What had the world—its literature, its music, its philosophies, or its history—to do with a man who saw it habitually for the thing it was: a bit of Fabergé nonsense?

Marseilles, at close quarters, was no jeweller’s creation. It was the usual noisy crowded place filled with impatient taxi-horns and the smell of stale coffee; that very French smell that haunts its houses with the ghosts of ten million coffee-brewings. But the sun shone, and the striped awnings flapped a little in the breeze from the Mediterranean, and the mimosa displayed its pale expensive yellow in prodigal masses. As a companion picture to the grey and scarlet of London it was, he thought, perfect. If he ever was rich he would commission one of the best artists in the world to put the two pictures on canvas for him; the chiaroscuro of London and bright positive blaze of Marseilles. Or perhaps two different artists. It was unlikely that the man who could convey the London of a grey day in April would also be able to paint the essence of Marseilles on a spring noon.

He stopped thinking about artists and ceased to find Marseilles either bright or positive when he found that the Martin family had left their suburb only the week before for parts unknown. Unknown, that was, to the neighbours. By the time that he had with the help of the local authorities discovered that ‘part unknown’ merely meant Toulon, a great deal of precious time had been wasted, and still more was wasted in journeying to Toulon and finding the Martins among its teeming inhabitants.

But in the end he found them and listened to the little they had to tell. Charles was a ‘bad boy’, they said, with all the antagonism of the French for someone who has apostatised from that supreme god of the French idolatry, the Family. He had always been a wilful, headstrong creature and (crime of crimes in the French calendar) lazy. Bone lazy. He had gone away five years ago after a small trouble over a girl—no, no, he had merely stabbed her—and had not bothered to write to them. They had had no news of him in all those years except that a friend had run into him in Port Said about three years ago. He was doing pavement deals in second-hand cars, the friend said. Buying up crocks and selling them after he had tinkered with them a little. He was a very good mechanic; he could have been a very successful man, with a garage of his own and people working for him, if he had not been so lazy. Bone lazy. A laziness that was formidable. A laziness that was a disease. They had heard nothing more of him until they had been asked to identify his body.