Humphrey stroked his wounded cheek.
‘Scars wouldn’t worry me. Might worry Dixie.’
‘As a qualified refrigerator engineer and a union man you could have your pick of the girls.’
‘I know, but I want Dixie.’ He put the eggs and bacon slowly away into the side of his mouth.
The rain of a cold summer morning fell on Nelly Mahone as she sat on a heap of disused lorry tyres in the yard of Paley’s, scrap merchants of Meeting-house Lane. She had been waiting since ten past nine although she did not expect Dougal to arrive until ten o’clock. He came at five past ten, bobbing up and down under an umbrella.
‘They come to see me Saturday,’ she said at once. ‘Trevor Lomas, Collie Gould, Leslie Crewe. They treated me bad.’
‘You’ve got wet,’ Dougal said. ‘Why didn’t you take shelter?’
She looked round the yard. ‘Got to be careful where you go, son. Stand up in the open, they can only tell you to move on. But go inside a place. they can call the cops. Her nose thrust forward towards the police station at the corner of the lane.
Dougal looked round the yard for possible shelter. The bodies of two lorries, bashed in from bad accidents, stood lopsided in a corner. On a low wooden cradle stood a house-boat. ‘We’ll go into the boat.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t get up there.’
Dougal kicked a wooden crate over and over till it stood beneath the door of the boat. He pulled the door- handle. Eventually it gave way. He climbed in, then out again, and took Nelly by the arm.
‘Up you go, Nelly.’
‘What if the cops come?’
‘I’m in with them,’ Dougal said.
‘Jesus, that’s not your game?’
‘Up you go.
He heaved her up and settled in the boat beside her on a torn upholstered seat. Some sad cretonne curtains still drooped in the windows. Dougal drew them across the windows as far as was possible.
‘I feel that ill,’ Nelly said.
‘I’m not too keen on illness,’ Dougal said.
‘Nor me. They come to ask after you,’ Nelly said. ‘They found out you was seeing me. They got your code. They want to know what’s cheese. They want to know what’s your code key, they offer me ten quid. They want to know who’s your gang.’
‘I’m in with the cops, tell them.’
‘That I would never believe. They want to know who’s Rose Hathaway. They’ll be back again. I got to tell them something.’
‘Tell them I’m paid by the police to investigate certain irregularities in the industrial life of Peckham in the first place. See, Nelly? I mean crime at the top in the wee factories. And secondly-’
Her yellowish eyes and wet grey hair turned towards him in a startled way.
‘If I thought you was a nark -‘
‘Investigator,’ Dougal said. ‘It all comes under human research. And secondly my job covers various departments of youthful terrorism. So you can just tell me, Nelly, what they did to you on Saturday afternoon.’
‘Ah, they didn’t do nothing out of the way.’
‘You said they treated you roughly.’
‘No, not so to get them in trouble.’
Dougal took out an envelope. ‘Your ten pounds,’ he said.
‘You can keep it,’ Nelly said. ‘I’m going on my way.’
‘Feel my head, Nelly.’ He guided her hand to the two small bumps among his curls.
‘Cancer of the brain a-coming on,’ she said.
‘Nelly, I had a pair of horns like a goat when I was born. I lost them in a fight at a later date.’
‘Holy Mary, let me out of here. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with you.’
Dougal stood up and found that by standing astride in the middle of the boat he could make it rock. So he rocked it for a while and sang a sailor’s song to Nelly.
Then he helped her to climb down from the boat, put up his umbrella, and tried to catch up with her as she hurried out of the scrap yard. A policeman, coming out of the station, at the corner, nodded to Dougal.
‘I’ll be going into the station, then, Nelly,’ Dougal said. ‘To see my chums.’
She stared at him, then spat on the rainy pavement. ‘And I don’t mind,’ Dougal said, ‘if you tell Trevor Lomas what I’m doing. You can tell him if he returns my notebooks to me there will be nothing further said. We policemen have got to keep our records and our secret codes, you realize.’
She moved sideways away from him, watching the traffic so that she could cross at the earliest moment.
‘You and I,’ Dougal said, ‘won’t be molested from that quarter for a week or two if you give them the tip- off.’
He went into the station yard to see how the excavations were getting on. He discovered that the tunnel itself was now visible from the top of the shaft.
Dougal pointed out to his policemen friends the evidence of the Thames silt in the under-soil. ‘One time,’ he said, ‘the Thames was five miles wide, and it covered all Peckham.’
So they understood, they said, from other archaeologists who were interested in the excavation.
‘Hope I’m not troubling you if I pop in like this from time to time?’ Dougal said.
‘No, sir, you’re welcome. We get people from the papers sometimes as well as students. Did you read of the finds?’
Towards evening a parcel was delivered at Miss Frierne’s addressed to Dougal. It contained his notebooks.
‘I hope to remain with you,’ Dougal said to Miss Frierne, ‘for at least two months. For I see no call upon me to remove from Peckham as yet.’
‘If I’m still alive…‘ Miss Frierne said. ‘I saw that man again this morning. I could swear it was my brother.’
‘You didn’t speak to him?’
‘No. Something stopped me.’ She began to cry. ‘Who put the pot of indoor creeping ivy in my room?’ Dougal said. ‘Was it my little dog-toothed blonde process-controller?’
‘Yes, it was a scraggy little blonde. Looks as if she could do with a good feed. They all do.’
Mr Druce whispered, ‘I couldn’t manage it the other night. Things were difficult.’
‘I sat at the Dragon in Dulwich from nine till closing time,’ Dougal said, ‘and you didn’t come.’
‘I couldn’t get away. Mrs Druce was on the watch. If you’d come to that place in Soho-’
Dougal consulted his pocket diary. He shut it and put it away. ‘Next month it would have to be. This month my duties press.’ He rose and walked up and down Mr Druce’s office as with something on his mind.
‘I called for you last Saturday,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I thought you would care for a spin.’
‘So I understand,’ Dougal said absently. ‘I believe I was researching on Miss Coverdale that afternoon.’ Dougal smiled at Mr Druce. ‘Interrogating her, you know.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Her devotion to you is quite remarkable,’ Dougal said. ‘She spoke of you continually.’
‘As a matter of interest, what did she say? Look, Dougal, you can’t trust everyone -‘
Dougal looked at his watch. ‘Goodness,’ he said, ‘the time. What I came to see you about – the question of my increase in salary.’
‘It’s going through,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I put it to the Board that, since Weedin’s breakdown, a great deal of extra work falls on your shoulders.’
Dougal massaged both his shoulders, first his high one, then his low one.
‘Dougal,’ said Mr Druce.
‘Vincent,’ said Dougal, and departed.
Chapter 8
