Fellow Passenger (26 page)

‘Well, if he is,’ he said. ‘‘E’d better be upstairs than in the bar.’

He took a quick look at the innocent evening outside his porch, and then led me up to the first floor and unlocked a cheerless, dusty bedroom which had not been used for years.

‘Been all alone ere since the missus passed away,’ he said by way of apology. ‘Sleeps in the parlour, meself. Saves trouble, like. You make yerself as comfortable as what you can, and keep the door locked, see? You and me, we’ll ‘ave a little talk after closing-time.’

He tried the window blinds and, finding that they still worked, told me that I could safely switch on the light after nightfall.

I threw my pack and guitar on the bed, and dropped into a broken-springed arm-chair. Speculation was useless. It was enough for the moment that Harry Cole evidently had in his old bones long experience of dealing with inquisitive strangers and the Law. So I removed beard and turban and settled down to enjoy the country silence, pleasantly broken by an occasional rumble of deep voices from the bar below.

Soon after eight there was a scratching at my door, and Cole announced himself in a throaty whisper. I did not bother to replace my oriental trappings. I was in his hands.

He entered with a tray on which were a plate of ham, bread and cheese and a tankard of bitter. As I held the door open for him, he edged round me in a quarter circle, staring.

‘Cut yer beard, ‘ave you?’ he asked.

I tossed him the false one. I thought it would amuse him.

‘Damme, that’s just what your father would a done!’ he exclaimed. ‘Forty-five year gone, and I remember that smile of ‘is like as if it was yesterday. Aye, and what I can see of your face is the spitten image of ‘is except that e was a white man. As a matter o’ colour, I mean.’

I could not resist telling him that I was no darker than anyone else who had lived most of his life under tropical sun, and that on my mother’s side there was Inca blood.

‘Inkier, was she?’ he asked. ‘Well, yer father was never one to mind that. Man or woman, e took ‘em for what they were. So you’re the little Claudio, which e was that proud of! Well, ‘ow time do pass for them as don’t ‘ave nothing agin it.’

Somebody punched a bell down in the bar, and he silently vanished with an encouraging sideways throw of the head, as if to assure me that it would soon be ten o’clock and closing-time.

Eventually I heard the formula:
Time, gentlemen, please!
the reluctant steps on the road outside, the final shutting and bolting of the door and the clink of glass being collected into the sink. Quarter of an hour later Harry Cole brought me down to his parlour. It was, I suppose, filthy; for an old man ate in it and slept in it and had it doubtfully swept out once a week. But there was a comfortable fire in the grate and whisky was on the table. Cleanliness is so unimportant. The interludes in my life which I look back on as most enjoyable must have been watched, with an anticipatory gleam, by the eyes of uncounted mice and insects in unwashed corners.

Harry Cole grumbled about the difficulties of running a pub alone - except for a girl who came to wash up every morning and a barman who helped him out in holiday seasons. This was all conversation. He was creating, without embarrassment, a human relationship before coming to the point.

‘You’re goin’ to ‘ave a shock,’ he said at last.

I replied that I had had a fairish few in the last five months.

‘Ah, but this un is different,’ he warned me. ‘Your name ain’t Howard-Wolferstan. It’s Tutty.’

I received this announcement with regret but equanimity. I had no intention of changing Howard-Wolferstan for Tutty. A man’s name, after all, is that by which he is known. And I was singularly well known as Howard-Wolferstan.

‘Now, what I got to say is this,’ he went on. ‘Your dad and I was - well, burglars.
You
know, ‘ouse-breakers. A mug’s game, if you ask me. Still, it was better than workin’ in a cheap jeweller’s back room and losin’ yer eyesight cos e wouldn’t pay for the lightin, which was the trade we was apprenticed to.

‘I’d been brought up honest. But yer dad was an orphan, and e’d been in one of them ‘omes since e was five year old. Church of England, of course. That’s where e got ‘is lovely manners from. It was a pleasure to ear ‘im speakin to the gentry and then imitatin’ of ‘em, for gentry there was in them days.’

Cole’s accent was Hampshire grafted upon cockney, with the former predominant. I find it wearisome to try to reproduce his words, for one cannot avoid a touch of the comic, whereas his whole attitude was one of warm and admiring sincerity. I could hear his love of my father coming through every burring vowel of his voice. It fired my own. Dear, joyous, respected Don Jaime, what a way he had come from so scandalous a beginning as Jim Tutty! I could see at last why he would never return to England, even for a holiday, and already guess, very vaguely, at his connection with Moreton Intrinseca.

Harry Cole and Jim Tutty got away with quite a number of small jobs and had every reason to congratulate themselves upon their choice of profession. They were not known to the police, and they both had a gift for keeping their mouths shut. Eventually, however, they were run in. My father’s orphanage education had been more thorough and liberal than is the custom to-day, and had taught him to think for himself. At the hearing in the magistrates’ court he spotted the one weakness in the police case, and, when the pair of them came up for trial at the Old Bailey he chose from the dock an ancient warhorse of a counsel, instructed him in whispers and got himself and his partner triumphantly acquitted.

‘You ought to a seed the judge’s face!’ chuckled Harry Cole. ‘But elp yerself, lad, without waitin’ for me, cos there’s worse a comin’!’

After that they were closely marked men in London, whom the police intended to shop by fair means or foul; so they decided to keep on the move in the country and to aim at a few big jobs rather than a lot of little ones. My father hit on the idea - not nearly such common practice then - of watching the society news in the papers.

‘None o’ them film actresses,’ Cole said. ‘It was all Jerry princes in them days.’

They spotted that their Serene Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Dettingen-zu-Langenschwalbach were due to stay with Sir Edward and Lady Lockinge at their place near Moreton Intrinseca. I saw the house when I was prowling round the district. It is now a racing stable, and paint and woodwork are crumbling away. But in 1908 it was the latest thing in rich bankers’ country houses - all gables, red brick, white balconies and solid comfort.

My father reckoned that as the Lockinges had not entertained minor royalty before the whole place would be in an uproar of excitement and disorganization right up to the last moment. What pickings there would be he did not know, but that sufficient impudence would take himself and Cole within range he was certain. Their only assets were two bicycles, a suitcase and outfits of black coat and striped trousers which made them - or at any rate my father - appear upper servants of the utmost respectability.

“E looked that reliable,’ Cole told me, ‘that if e drove up in a ‘ansom cab you’d a given ‘im a hunderd pounds to take round to the bank for you.’

They changed into clean, stiff linen and their professional clothes under cover of a shrubbery. Then my father, bowler hat on head, introduced himself into the house as the English valet of a visiting German colonel, and to the colonel himself as the valet who had been attached to him by order of Sir Edward Lockinge. He picked up two violin cases which belonged to the Hungarian String Band, strolled majestically out with them to the shrubbery and then got Harry Cole through the back door as baggage-master and man-of-all-work to the band. The band, of course, was led to believe - like the colonel - that Sir Edward had attached a special underling to them, and Harry was soon at work helping them to put up their music stands and the screen of potted palms.

Having established their bona fides quite well to answer hurried questions in the general rush, they explored the house. Luck, up to a point, was with them. Their Serene Highnesses arrived soon after six p.m. Sir Edward, Lady Lockinge and their guests were all bowing and curtseying in the entrance hall, and the servants were watching discreetly from the upper windows. Sir Edward, however, had a banker’s respect for material possessions. He had stationed a private detective in Lady Lockinge’s bedroom.

‘Ought to a trusted er ladyship’s maid,’ Harry said. ‘We wouldn’t ‘ave done nothin’ to er.’

As it was, they found the detective, like everyone else, gazing out of the window at all the animated flunkeydom on the gravelled drive and red-carpeted steps below. They asked him if they might have a look, too, and in a matter of seconds had him rolled up in a rug, gagged and deposited under the chintz flounces of Lady Lockinge’s bed. Then they walked peacefully out of the room with Lady Lockinge’s gold toilet set, her diamond tiara and necklace to match and a few odd rings, all stuffed into a pillow-case. There was nothing to hide it but the German colonel’s full dress uniform hanging over my father’s arm. That and his majestic walk acted as a passport so long as they were among the outbuildings of the house and could possibly be going to some obscure room where leather and spurs were polished. They put the stables between themselves and the house, and then had to waste a lot of time reaching the shrubbery by short dashes or on hands and knees. I gathered that, by the time they had changed and recovered their bicycles, their nerves were shattered.

Once on the road, they felt more confident. They proposed to ride straight and hard for the outskirts of London, and get clear of all likely police interference before the alarm went out. But they were at the beginning of the great change from the Railway Age, and not up to date. They had not quite got hold of the speed of the telephone, though they knew that Sir Edward had installed it at vast expense with miles of private poles, and they certainly had not reckoned with police cars. It must have been one of the very earliest which pulled across the road in a cloud of dust just outside the village of Moreton Intrinseca. Harry hadn’t a chance from the start. My father shoved his bike between a policeman’s legs and bolted up a dark drive and into the trees. The tiara, the necklace and the smaller articles of the gold toilet set were in his capacious pockets. Harry, who was the faster and lighter cyclist, had the suitcase and the heavy pieces.

It was deep dusk, for the month was September and there was then no summer time. My father simply vanished.

‘“Go it, Jim!” I sings out. “You got ‘em, Jim!” Well, o’course I were excited, like, but I didn’t ought to a done that, for it elped ‘em to identify ‘im. I wouldn’t tell ‘em nothin’. But they knew as ‘ow we’d worked together afore, and so there was a warrant out for Jim Tutty.’

Sir Edward Lockinge was then High Sheriff of the county, and raving furious that such an outrage could have occurred at a moment when his banker’s ambitions had been satisfied to the full, and there was minor royalty under his roof. The result was that, besides those few primitive police cars, Sir Edward’s Daimlers, crammed with more police, converged upon Moreton Intrinseca. Harry Cole told me he didn’t know there were so many cars outside London.

They stopped the drives and paths of Moreton Manor. They patrolled the high brick wall over which I had climbed. They searched, perfunctorily, the house, for it seemed utterly impossible that my father could have effected an entry when all the staff was awake and the whole place blazing with light. They remained on the spot for two days, but never a sign of dear Jim Tutty did they find.

Harry Cole got seven years, of which he served five and a half. When he came out, a solicitor’s clerk met him at the prison gate and told him that his firm was acting on behalf of a Mr Howard-Wolferstan of Quito, Ecuador, who had instructed them to see that Mr Harry Cole was comfortably settled.

“Oward-Wolferstan, I says to meself, now where ‘ave I eard that name before? They didn’t give yer enough to eat inside in them days, ye see, and yer memory got all mixed up between what you ‘oped would ‘appen and what
‘ad
‘ap-pened. And then I remembers it was the name of the bloke what was living at Moreton Manor. Mentioned at me trial, it was. Rented it furnished, e ‘ad for a year or so, and e ‘adn’t been there more than a month, like, before e ‘as the police bustin’ down the erbacious border. So I says to meself: Gawd, if that ain’t just like Jim! ‘Adn’t time to get away with nothin’ from ‘Oward-Wolferstan, so e goes and pinches his name!’

Harry Cole received a hundred pounds then and there, and a letter from my father offering anything up to five hundred to set him up in business. Harry replied that he would take it later, for it was December, 1914, and he was determined to enlist. He had come out of prison with the hot patriotism of the common man as well as an understandable and quite illogical dislike of all Germans from Serene Highnesses downwards. He became a horse-gunner, was twice wounded and ended the war as a sergeant. In 1920, when he was demobilized, my father kept him going for a year and then bought him
The Tracehorse
, where Harry had remained ever since, moderately prosperous and, till his wife died, very contented.

“‘Course I always thought Jim ‘ad got the stuff over to that there Ecuador and sold it safe,’ Cole said. ‘And it weren’t till I read in the papers what you said to the beaks, that you was lookin’ in the ‘ouse for family property, that I knew e ‘adn’t. Then I sees it all as plain as if it was yesterday. Jim got into the ouse and stayed there doggo for we don’t know ‘ow long while the coppers was lookin’ for ‘im over ‘alf the county. ‘E ‘id the stuff, meanin to come back for it when e ‘ad a chance, but e never did ‘ave no chance. ‘Is description was out, and they was ot after ‘im. So e must a said to ‘isself: the game’s up, Jim, unless you ‘ops it off to somewheres where you ain’t known. And so e ups and ‘ops it.’