Josephine Tey - The Collected Works

Erica wished that the tent had not been in a wood. From her earliest childhood she had been fearless by nature (the kind of child of whom older people say out hunting: Not a nerve in her body), but there was no denying that she didn’t like woods. She liked to see a long way away. And though the stream ran bright and clear and merry in the sunlight, the pool in the hollow was still and deep and forbidding. One of those sudden, secret cups of black water more common in Sussex than in Kent.

As she came across the clearing carrying the little dancer in her hand, a dog rushed out at her, shattering the quiet with hysterical protest. And at the noise a woman came to the tent door and stood there watching Erica as she came. She was a very tall woman, broadshouldered and straight, and Erica had the mad feeling that this long approach to her over an open floor should end in a curtsey.

“Good afternoon,” she called, cheerfully, above the clamour of the dog. But the woman waited without moving. “I have a piece of china—Can’t you make that dog be quiet?” She was face to face with her now, only the noise of the dog between them.

The woman lifted a foot to the animal’s ribs, and the high yelling died into silence. The murmur of the stream came back.

Erica showed the broken porcelain figure.

“Harry!” called the woman, her black inquisitive eyes not leaving Erica. And Harry came to the tent door: a small weaselish man with bloodshot eyes, and evidently in the worst of tempers. “A job for you.”

“I’m not working,” said Harry, and spat.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I heard you were very good at mending things.”

The woman took the figure and broken piece from Erica’s hands. “He’s working, all right,” she said.

Harry spat again, and took the pieces. “Have you the money to pay?” he asked, angrily.

“How much will it be?”

“Two shillings.”

“Two and six,” said the woman.

“Oh, yes, I have that much.”

He went back into the tent, and the woman stood in the way, so that Erica could neither follow nor see. Unconsciously she had, in imagining this moment, always placed herself inside the tent—with the coat folded up in the corner. Now she was not even to be allowed to see inside.

“He won’t be long,” Queenie said. “By the time you’ve cut a whistle from the ash tree, it’ll be ready.”

Erica’s small sober face broke into one of its rare smiles. “You thought I couldn’t do that, didn’t you?” For the woman’s phrase had been a flick in the face of a supposed town-dweller.

She cut the wood with her pocket-knife, shaped it, nicked it, and damped it in the stream, hoping that a preoccupation might disarm Queenie and her partner. She even hoped that the last processes of whistle-manufacture might be made in friendly company with the mending of china. But the moment she moved back to the tent, Queenie came from her desultory stick-gathering in the wood to stand guard. And Erica found her whistle finished and the mended figure in her hands, without being one whit wiser or richer than she was when she left the car in the road. She could have cried.

She produced her small purse (Erica hated a bag) and paid her half-crown, and the sight of the folded notes in the little back partition all waiting to do their work of rescue, drove her to desperation. Without any warning and without knowing she was going to say it, she asked the man:

“What did you do with the coat you took at Dymchurch?”

There was a moment of complete stillness, and Erica rushed on:

“I don’t want to do anything about it. Prosecuting, or anything like that, I mean. But I do want that coat awfully bad. I’ll buy it back from you if you still have it. Or if you’ve pawned it—”

“You’re a nice one!” the man burst out. “Coming here to have a job of work done and then accusing a man of battle and blue murder. You be out of here before I lose my temper good and proper and crack you one on the side of the jaw. Impudent little——with your loose tongue. I’ve a good mind to twist it out of your bloody head, and what’s more I—”

The woman pushed him aside and stood over Erica, tall and intimidating.

“What makes you think my man took a coat?”

“The coat he had when Jake, the lorry-driver, gave him a lift a week last Tuesday was taken from a car at Dymchurch. We know that.” She hoped the “we” sounded well. And she hoped she didn’t sound as doubtful as she felt. They were both very innocent and indignant-looking. “But it isn’t a matter of making a case. We only want the coat back. I’ll give you a pound for it,” she added, as they were about to break in on her again.

She saw their eyes change. And in spite of her predicament a great relief flooded her. The man was the man. They knew what coat she was talking about.

“And if you’ve pawned it, I’ll give you ten shillings to tell me where.”

“What do you get out of this?” the woman said. “What do you want with a man’s coat?”

“I didn’t say anything about it being a man’s.” Triumph ran through her like an electric shock.

“Oh, never mind!” Queenie dismissed with rough impatience any further pretence. “What is it to you?”

If she mentioned murder they would both panic, and deny with their last breath any knowledge of the coat. She knew well, thanks to her father’s monologues, the petty offender’s horror of major crime. They would go to almost any lengths to avoid being mixed up, even remotely, in a capital charge.

“It’s to get Hart out of trouble,” she said. “He shouldn’t have left the car unattended. The owner is coming back tomorrow, and if the coat isn’t found by then Hart will lose his job.”

“Who’s Art?” asked the woman. “Your brother?”

“No. Our chauffeur.”

“Chauffeur!” Harry gave a high skirl of laughter that had little amusement in it. “That’s a good one. I suppose you have two Rolls Royces and five Bentleys.” His little red eyes ran over her worn and outgrown clothes.

“No. Just a Lanchester and my old Morris.” As their disbelief penetrated: “My name is Erica Burgoyne. My father is Chief Constable.”

“Ye’? My name is John D. Rockfeller, and my father was the Duke of Wellington.”

Erica whipped up her short tweed skirt, gripped the elastic waistband of the gym knickers she wore summer and winter, and pushed the inner side of it towards him on an extended thumb.

“Can you read?” she said.

“Erica M. Burgoyne,” read the astonished man, in red on a Cash’s label.

“It’s a great mistake to be too sceptical,” she said, letting the elastic snap back into place.

“So you’re doing it for a chauffeur, eh?” Harry leered at her, trying to get back his lost ground. “You’re very concerned about a chauffeur, aren’t you?”

“I’m desperately in love with him,” Erica said, in the tone in which one says: “And a box of matches, please.” At school theatricals Erica had always had charge of the curtains.

But it passed. Their minds were too full of speculation to be concerned with emotion.

“How much?” said the woman.

“For the coat?”

“No. For telling you where to find it.”

“I told you, I’ll give you ten shillings.”

“Not enough.”

“But how do I know you’ll tell me the truth?”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“All right, I’ll give you a pound. I shall still have to buy it from the pawnshop, you know.”

“It isn’t in a pawnshop,” the man said. “I sold it to a stone-breaker.”

“W-h-a-t!” cried Erica in a despairing wail. “Do I have to begin looking for someone else?”

“Oh, no need to look, no need at all. You hand over the cash, and I’ll tell you where to find the bloke.”