J.T. Edson: Blonde Genius

“No, Miss Benkinsop.” the sisters chorused.

“Come, Mr. Fiorelli,” Miss Benkinsop requested. “We’ll just have time to visit the Household Hints class before the Main Debate.”

As they left the room, the headmistress and her guest heard the English teacher delivering a homily to the pupils.

“All right, you two flipping layabouts. If you don’t do better this time, you’ll stay here and ‘ave another go. Even if none of us gets to see the Main Debate. And I’ll get a stinking cob on if I miss it.”

“Now if we were backing you,” Fiorelli remarked, as he and Miss Benkinsop walked to the next of the classes. “We’d organise Wise Shopping tours all over England.”

“Good Lord, no!” Miss Benkinsop gasped, horrified at the thought. “I wouldn’t dream of allowing it. The girls would lose their amateur standing.”

Still crouching uncomfortably in his place of concealment, Saunders mopped his brow with a handkerchief. The waiting was playing on his nerves. It was far worse than the night he had laid under the bed of a prominent all-in wrestler, while the twenty-stone mauler read aloud from a book of fairy tales until falling to sleep.

“Come on, Alf!” Saunders groaned. “Get the old boiler out of there. Then I’ll show her whose daughter’s not good enough for her school.”

“I don’t really care for the Household Hints class,” Miss Benkinsop remarked just before they entered. “It’s not ladylike, but we have to cater for all tastes.”

Looking around the room, Fiorelli had to admit that his hostess had been correct in her summation of its unsuitability for the gentle sex. Three different kinds of safe lined one wall. On a work bench lay an oxy-acetylene burner, oxygen bottles and other safe-blowing equipment. Along a second wall was what looked like a series of open-fronted booths. except that each compartment had a door opening to the next and affixed with a different type of lock.

The class had only one pupil. A small, dainty, blonde child with an angelic, if care-worn face, wearing overalls, worked with a set of skeleton keys on the third door. Unless her teacher had helped, she had already dealt with the first two locks.

“Good evening, Miss Panchez,” Miss Benkinsop greeted the Science teacher. “Not much of an attendance tonight.”

“Wasn’t expecting any, ” answered Miss Rita Panchez. She was a big, buxom, swarthy-featured woman with coal-black hair and sporting large loop earrings. Somehow she managed to make her tweed two-piece look as gaudy as the clothes usually worn by gypsy fortune-tellers on fairgrounds. When she spoke, it was in the manner of calling the rubes to “Roll up, Roll up, Try your Luck”. “They’re all at the Debates, I’d’ve told Violet to scarper, but”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“since she got her dad’s twirls and ’loid, she’s been upset about him.”

“Ah, they came did they?” Miss Benkinsop said, looking approvingly at the bunch of skeleton keys and strip of stout celluloid with which the little girl was acquiring her Household Hints.

“With the second post,” Miss Panchez confirmed. “You’re a wonder, Miss B., if I might say so. Nobody else could’ve got Scotland Yard to band ’em over.”

“You give me far too much credit,” Miss Benkinsop protested. “I merely made the suggestion.”

Being a lady of considerable tact, diplomacy and loyalty to her friends, Miss Benkinsop did not feel it necessary to explain that the return of the “twirls and ’loid” had been arranged for her by the current head of M.I.5. An old war-time associate, he had been only too willing to oblige when she had made the request.

At that moment, diverting attention from the subject, the lock clicked and Violet opened the door, With hardly a glance at the grown-ups, she moved through the cubicle. Checking for burglar alarms, she set to work on the next of the locks when satisfied that no such unnecessary devices were fitted. Stepping over, Fiorelli glanced casually at the type of mechanism the little girl had just dealt with. Then he stared harder, whistled his surprise and rejoined the women.

“I’ve seen top-flight screwsmen who couldn’t have opened one of those pin-tumbler locks as quickly as she did it,” the man declared.

“I’ve always maintained that it’s blood and breeding that count,” Miss Benkinsop answered. “It runs in the family. Her father is Harry Suggett—”

“The cat-burglar?” Fiorelli ejaculated and his right hand involuntarily moved towards the slight bulge caused by the walkie-talkie in his dinner jacket’s inside breast pocket.

“Yes,” agreed the headmistress. “Do you know him?”

“We’ve never met. I’ve heard about him, though. He’s one of the best.”

“Without wishing to sound chauvinistic, I would say he is the best—or was. He always took such an interest in his family. Violet’s learned a lot from him. Then again, she is Amanda’s fag and that’s probably helped her even more.”

“Apart from Amanda,” Miss Panchez put in, “Violet’s the best in the class.”

“I hardly think we can call Amanda part of the class,” Miss Benkinsop corrected. “She instructs it.”

“Does Amanda do everything around here?” Fiorelli inquired.

“Good heavens, no,” Miss Benkinsop smiled, “She could do, of course, but one doesn’t like to impose upon her good nature.”

“She’s always around if we need her, thank Gawd,” Miss Panchez elaborated, then glanced at Violet. “Poor little love. She’s crying.”

Immediately the two teachers hurried across to the cubicle, all their maternal instincts aroused.

“There, there, child,” Miss Benkinsop said gently, slipping a comforting arm around Violet’s shoulders, “I know it’s hard to lose one’s papa, but you must try to be brave.”

“Ye-Yes’m!” Violet sniffed, making a valiant effort to restrain her grief. “F-F-Fifteen years is such a long time.”

“That it is,” Miss Benkinsop admitted. “But you must take comfort in the thought that the sentence is a tribute to your dear papa’s social prominence.”

“Yes, love,” Miss Panchez went on, her normally strident tones strangely gentle. “And they’d never’ve got him but for that dirty grass, Gus Saunders.”

“I—I know, ma’am,” Violet admitted, looking pained, angry and disturbed. “That’s another thing. With Mama in hospital having a baby, there’s nobody to see to him.”

“I understand, dear, Miss Benkinsop said feelingly. Remind me, First thing in the morning, Miss Panchez, to call Maxie Spender and have him prepare a thirty-stitch—will thirty be sufficient, Violet?”

“Yesm,” the third-former agreed, although she would liked to have asked for more. A Benkinsopian was taught never to be greedy.

“Then thirty it will be. Maxie will arrange for a thirty-stitch redemption of Saunders, Miss Benkinsop stated, but looked at her guest and remembered her manners. Unless, of course, your organisation would like to handle the matter, Mr. Fiorelli?”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Fiorelli replied, speaking with great clarity to make sure that the listening Saunders would be able to hear and understand. “We’d do it, and welcome, but you know what these London mobs are like about overseas’ intervention in the British market?”

“I do,” Miss Benkinsop agreed. “Maxie Spender it will be then.”

Although both Miss Panchez and Fiorelli knew that Maxie Spender was attending the Debating Evening. neither mentioned the fact. Fiorelli had no desire to alarm the expert whom he had hired to carry out a specialised piece of business; one that would be of vital importance later in the negotiations for taking the school under the Mediterranean Syndicate’s protective wing. For her part, Miss Panchez had learned that Miss Benkinsop never cared to discuss business on social occasions.