The Walking Stick (25 page)

The foghorn droned again in the river. Dead silence in the studio. Leigh’s coffee cup rattled as he put it down.

‘So it’s off,’ I said.

Jack Foil shrugged.

‘Or it’s postponed,’ I said. ‘Perhaps next month.’

‘The same sale won’t be on then, will it?’

‘There’ll be others.’

‘What others?’

Silence. There was a constricting band round my lungs. After the early cold the studio was now overheated.

‘Would you do it?’ asked Jack Foil.

‘Look,’ said Jack Foil, ‘don’t upset yourself, Miss Dainton. Calm down and have a little drink of this. Leigh, pour her out a finger or so. Just a dash
of soda . . .
That’s
right. Of
course
, you refuse. Anyone would at first thought. The way you were brought up – the elite sort of way – I see exactly how you feel.
It’s brought on you suddenly, but you see it was brought on us suddenly and we felt rather desperate in a way and thought, well, Deborah’s done so
much
, been so
much
help.
Maybe . . .’

‘Well, I’m sorry.’

‘So are we all. But we won’t press you; we’ll leave you to think it over.’

‘Don’t do that – ’

‘But before I go, just let me say what would happen. Just let me say, so that you can judge better. Just let me say . . . Wednesday evening, people leaving, you get ready to leave, hat and
coat, gloves, scarf, all on. People leaving. Right! You leave, they think. But instead you slip into one of those cupboards.
You
know. They’re all over the building. It’s
made
for hide and seek. Lovely big cupboards. A bit dusty, maybe, some full, some half full, some empty: I’ve seen them. You sit down. You’ve a watch. It’ll be a long wait.
But not too hard really. No risk really. You wait. And at two-twenty, you come out, just when the guard’s gone by; then you slip up to the boss’s office on the ground floor, avoiding
the telephone room where the other guard is, just slip in to the boss’s office and switch off the two alarm switches. Right?’ He wiped the corners of his eyes. ‘Then what? Then
you just walk down the corridor to the back door, knowing the patrolling guard’s upstairs, and let yourself out. And you don’t lock the door after you. Then you go home. That’s
all. Don’t even need to see us. Never see us. No connection. Off you go home. Finished. Done with. It isn’t too hard, is it? I’ll leave you to think about it.’

‘Please don’t.’

Mr Irons spoke. ‘How do we get the code word? I couldn’t promise to do the job in less than a couple of hours, minimum.’

‘Oh, that could be seen to,’ Jack Foil said. ‘Ted can tap the wire. He wasn’t in the PO for two years for nothing. He can tap it about midnight. No difficulty there. If
Miss Dainton could do her part.’

‘Look, Jack—’ Leigh said.

‘Oh, I know, I know. We’ll say nothing more now. But I do ask her to think about it. I ask you both to think about it. She’s done so much – helped so much – more
than this, I believe. It’s due to her we could plan at all. This . . . I know it’s a bit overfacing at first sight, at first thought. But it means three moves, that’s all. She
pretends to leave and doesn’t, sits in a cupboard. Move one. Move two, she goes up the stairs and switches off the alarms. Move three, she leaves by the back door and leaves it
unlocked.’

‘Oh, it’s asking a lot,’ said Ted, chewing his cigarette and twitching. ‘It’s nerve. You got to have nerve.’

‘Miss Dainton’s got nerve. Don’t tell me different. She’s one of those people you can see.’

‘Oh, stop it, Jack,’ said Leigh.

‘Look, Leigh. I’m putting my cards on the table. I’m not,’ said Jack Foil, smiling at me, ‘I’m not bullying anybody. If this thing falls through because Miss
Dainton won’t help that’s just very, very unfortunate. We’re all a lot poorer, and
disappointed
,
very
disappointed because we’ve missed all we planned to do.
But don’t tell me Miss Dainton wouldn’t have the nerve if she so felt like it. That’s not flattery or bribery or anything else. I’d put a lot of money on her if she felt
like it. I try,’ he said, ‘to be efficient, so I think I know efficiency in other folk. Well, she may be a slip of a girl, and a trifle handicapped at that; but I’d rather choose
her than any of you men here if I was in a tight corner!’

Leigh said: ‘You shouldn’t have come here, any of you! You shouldn’t have asked her!’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Jack. ‘She doesn’t need your protection. Or advice. It’s up to her. I’ve got confidence in her judgement. Come along, boys, we’ve
said all we can.’

The bedside lamp that we’d bought made three concentric light rings on the ceiling, like a target. Into the target area an insect was crawling – a small beetle. We
were troubled with beetles here; they came in from the river or bred in the damp timbers of the balcony. Some I hated, but this was small and harmless. It moved very slowly, stopping now and then
as if without purpose. Each ring was brighter than the last, and you could see it hesitating before moving into a yet clearer light. It should have had a shadow but its legs were too short.

Leigh said: ‘Let’s go to sleep, love. The argument’s over.’

Over? But how over? Nothing conclusive, nothing decided. All my refusals accepted, but accepted in the way an advancing army accepts casualties without halting the advance. Two escapes, really,
only two: hysteria or illness. Neither will I stoop to. But only blank refusal. Leigh on their side or mine?

‘Go to sleep, Deborah,’ he said again.

‘You really want me to do it?’

‘How can I say?’

‘Well, you can say.’

‘No . . . They’d no bloody right to ask you – that’s what I feel at heart. But there’s so much preparation been made, there’s so much at stake – for us
to gain. It gives me the works to think of you getting involved in any serious way, in any
danger
. And I think, of
course
she mustn’t, mustn’t think of it. And then I
think of you not doing it and all our plans coming to nothing and having to start at square one again – and I think of the shop we want to buy, and putting a deposit down and moving in and
beginning to alter it, and having enough money to set up and buy a bit of stock and start in business together. And that makes the difference. It’s awful. There may be other chances, of
course, but they may be next year, or they may not ever come like this again. In any case
this
shop’ll go. God, I don’t know what to say, really I don’t!’

‘You’ve said it.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve said it. We’ve talked it out. Can you go to sleep?’

‘No.’

‘Can’t we put out the light and see?’

‘No.’

The beetle had crawled into the second brighter band, but then, disliking it, or perhaps being diverted by some current of interest perceptible only to itself, it turned and moved off into the
greyer band again.

Which is the worst step? The first, the tiny movement over the forbidden line, into the forbidden territory – or a wild overrunning? Which is asking the most?

Leigh said: ‘Irons is a queer bird, isn’t he?’

‘Who?’

‘John Irons.’

‘Oh, yes . . .’

‘I only met him last month. Jack’s known him for some time. The absolute pro. D’you know he told me he’s never broken in anywhere since he was twenty? When it’s
ready for him, he walks in and does his part of the job. Like a surgeon, almost. Other people have to make all the preparation.’

The beetle had come back again, seemed agitated, and then suddenly stopped dead and made no move, became just a mark on the ceiling.

‘Of course he’s been inside two or three times. He’s the only one connected with us with a record. It’s a pity to have anyone the police know, but you can’t do
without one expert in this.’

‘I would call Jack an expert.’

‘Well, in his own line, yes. But he’s too smart to have been caught. He organizes. But not often, that’s the point. He lives off antiques. He stays in the
background.’

After a minute I said: ‘I think his wife’s scared of him.’

‘Who? Doreen? Of Jack? Whatever makes you say that?’

‘Aren’t you, Leigh?’

‘What, scared of Jack? . . . Why should I be? Maybe he’s the leader because he’s got the know-how, the connections. But scared . . .’

‘So he is the leader?’

‘Yes . . . so far as anyone is. He has the ideas. But it’s all a pretty friendly set-up, as you can see.’

‘There wasn’t anyone else at our party?’

‘No . . . But in the early stages Jack wanted to be anonymous. It’s just a precaution.’

‘You’re always different when he’s around.’

‘Different? How?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Less positive. He takes sureness from you.’

‘Well, he’s given me a lot in return.’

‘Has he?’

‘He was the first person, ever, to treat me seriously as a painter.’

The beetle had moved again, started forward into the brightest circle of light. It was in the bull’s-eye. I don’t know what attraction or repulsion moved in its primitive nerve
centres, but it began to go round in a circle itself, moving as it were on a central pivot, as if afraid of attack. This went on for a minute or more and then, perhaps intimidated by danger I
couldn’t see, it abruptly abandoned its defence and scuttled off, from bright ring to less bright, to grey, to dark, and then was lost to view in the shadows of the corner.

‘Put out the light,’ I said to Leigh.

Tuesday was even more foggy than Monday. It was a return to the worst conditions before smokeless zones. London Airport was closed, trains were cancelled, ships were dockbound.
Statistics were released, no one knew how gleaned, of deaths from bronchitis and pneumonia, although so far only two days of fog had had to be endured. I overcame my allergy for tubes and reached
Whittington’s via Rotherhithe, Whitechapel, Holborn and Green Park. The tubes were crammed, over-hot and over-draughty, people shuffling, docile, waiting, pressing, coughing. I came up into
the sun-tempered haze of Piccadilly like Lazarus emerging from his tomb.

Whittington’s was quiet. Traffic choked the streets but fewer people than usual came to the West End from choice. It was the second view day for the jewellery sale. Emeralds stared up from
their glass cases cosseted in cream silk. The splendid Plouth diamonds shone with white fire. Parker and Davidson and Jones and Armitage were on watch. To those who came with expert inquiries the
cases could be discreetly opened and the jewels examined, but never except under the polite but careful gaze of two of our men. At the door Anson and Harper, two more of our commissionaires, both
ex-paratroopers, were casually ready to block any hurried exit. Of course it was not expected, had never happened, but it always
could
happen and therefore must be guarded against. The
ordinary visitor, interested perhaps in investing a few hundreds in a modest diamond or two, saw nothing to remark.

Downstairs we were going through a miscellaneous collection of china which had belonged to Lady Stockton. Surprisingly enough it had never properly been itemized even for insurance purposes and
some of it was difficult to ascribe and value. As we finished looking at each piece, Mary Fent wrote down what I told her and we stacked the piece in the cupboard beside the bookcases – those
bookcases which were full of all the most authoritative reference books on china and porcelain ever published. This was not one of the big cupboards, being only half length with open shelves
beneath. There was a big cupboard by the door, at present in an untidy mess with piles of old catalogues and art magazines and reports of sales in Paris and New York; on its left wall were pegs on
which we hung our hats and coats and where my now discarded stick was propped. There were also two big cupboards in the passage outside. Both were crammed to the doors with miscellaneous articles
which had been accepted for sale and then not sold. (Some had not reached their reserve and waited collection by owners who now appeared to have forgotten them; some we had withdrawn because they
had been proved to be useless fakes before they were offered; some had been mistakenly accepted with better things and were being held over in the expectation that some day they could be fitted
into a new sale of odds and ends.) At the end of this passage from our office was the private office of Smith-Williams, and opposite that a smaller but emptier cupboard. On this corner the passage
made a T, the left-hand turn leading to the furniture department and stairs up to the ground floor, the right-hand one leading to the strong room, and beyond that to the small antiquities
department and two rooms used for storing pictures.

I left that evening at six and was surprised to find Leigh waiting. The fog had come down again; it got into your nose and throat like diluted tear gas. He took my arm and led me among misted
figures and the haloes of cars. We groped our way across Bond Street and walked toward Cork Street. I expected his little Triumph, but we stopped at a big old Austin waiting at a parking meter.
Inside was Jack Foil. We all got in the back.

‘Miss Dainton . . . It is easier this way than meeting at a house. And this fog makes difficulties for us all . . . I wanted to thank you . . .’

‘Oh . . .’

‘I think it will be easy for you. I think so. You’ve – er – picked where you can wait?’

‘Yes . . .’

Leigh took my hand.

Jack Foil said: ‘We agree to your conditions that it should be at one-thirty and not at two-thirty. I quite appreciate . . . the waiting will be difficult – quite the hardest part of
it, I should say. You have a good watch?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘With a luminous face?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then all is quite simple. Really simple, Miss Dainton – no real cause for nerves or tension, believe me. I’ve given Leigh a paper with it all typed out.’

He paused. A man with a pear-shaped hat walked past: in the fog you couldn’t be absolutely sure.

The heavy, almost-educated voice went on: ‘The Safeguard at the telephone rings his headquarters at a quarter to one, a quarter past one, a quarter to two. The Safeguard on patrol, clocks
in in the basement at one o’clock, on the first floor at twenty past one, on the ground floor at twenty to two. You will leave your place of hiding at exactly twenty minutes past one, proceed
slowly up the stairs and go into Mr Greeley’s office and switch off the alarms at twenty-two minutes past one. At this time you will know that the patrolling Safeguard is on the first floor,
having just clocked in. You will then come to the back door and unlock it and open it and we shall be waiting to come in. As we come in you will go out, your job nicely done.’