Dying to Know (17 page)

But now I had an excuse not to put myself through more agony. I put the fork down and said, ‘I don't know how you can suggest such a thing after what happened to you.'

‘It wouldn't be dangerous if there were two of us, would it? And anyway, it's hardly likely that someone else will break in; that would make three in one day, which is absurd.'

‘No, Max. Absolutely not.'

TWENTY-THREE

E
ven a full bottle of Shagnasty's Revenger before we came out could not quell my qualms as we prepared to go into Lightoller's house. We were on the patio where Mr Hocking and I had passed the time of day a few hours before. It had stopped raining but everything was damp, and it was almost as if we were in an underwater cavern; it had grown colder, too. By now it was about two in the morning; one of Masson's patrols had just passed so we reckoned we had about thirty minutes to get inside and lie low. I took the hammer that I had found in Dad's shed and now applied it to the gap between the French doors. Despite the head start, it still took a fair amount of effort to break, but I managed it after a couple of minutes of effort. I stood back and allowed Max to go in first and, in retrospect, I should have warned her then that there wasn't much elbow room. She had barely gone two feet into the room before a decidedly unmuffled crash and squealed cry of ‘bugger it' told me that she had found it out for herself.

‘Max? Be careful . . .'

She spun around, the inevitable result of which was a second crash followed this time by: ‘Sod it!'

‘Don't move,' I said, and slipped into the room behind her. She was surrounded by fragments of china. ‘What were they?'

‘The first one was some sort of china figure.' It probably wasn't valuable, I thought. Max continued, ‘And the second was similar.'

I mean the chances that this pair of figurines was worth much were tiny . . .

I took a deep breath and tried not to worry. ‘Never mind.'

‘Come on then, Lance. We'd better get this over with.'

I don't think I had ever felt so nervous as when I stood in that room with Max and looked around it. I heard the tremor in my voice as I asked, ‘What do we do now?'

‘We search of course, silly. You'd be no good as a burglar, would you?'

‘I never imagined that that would ever be a criticism of me that I should worry about.'

‘We could either split up with one of us going upstairs while the other stays down here, or we could stay together and do it room by room.'

The prospect of being alone in there gave me the heebie-jeebies. ‘We stay together,' I said at once, adding after a slight pause, ‘that way I can protect you if anything happens.'

She gave me a beaming smile of loving gratitude and I felt quite the man. ‘What do we look for?'

‘Papers, I suppose.' She sounded uncertain. ‘Papers and photographs, that kind of thing.'

It all sounded a bit on the vague side. ‘Is that all?'

She was already looking around the room, her torch beam picking out the numerous ornaments and the hotchpotch of furniture styles. In a distracted way, she answered, ‘And money, don't forget. If there's a safe full of money, that might be what this is all about.'

‘I forgot to bring my stethoscope. How am I going to open a safe?'

She missed the sarcasm. She had moved over to a wooden bureau perched upon elegantly turned legs. It wasn't locked and she was soon immersed in ferreting through the various drawers and compartments. Feeling neglected, I made myself busy with peering behind some of the oil paintings that hung from the picture rail. ‘Arthur Negus would love this place,' I said by way of conversation but Max said nothing.

We worked our way through every drawer, every possible hiding place, finding nothing except the everyday detritus of normal living. Max was initially excited by the discovery of gas bills, rates demands, a receipt from a local dentist for a check up, a red electricity bill and some shopping receipts, but soon realized that the great majority of the details of a life – any life – are boring to the point of death, and Oliver and Doris Lightoller were no different. These did not bear evidence of an extravagant lifestyle, merely a humdrum one; one not much different from our own. Her enthusiasm was briefly rekindled when she found some handwritten letters which she sat on the sofa and read by the light of her torch, but they proved to be from Doris to a childhood friend in Rhodesia and were filled with news about Oliver's athlete's foot and her prolapsed womb.

‘Perhaps it's in code,' she said optimistically.

‘Perhaps it's not.'

My beloved gave me a look of such intense irritation that even the darkness could not hide it. She got up. ‘Come on. We'd better get on.'

I followed her into the front room where, thankfully, the curtains were half-closed over thick net curtains; even so we had to close the curtains as slowly as we could in order not to signal our presence to the public at large. We could only hope that the regularly visiting police would not notice the change. Max set about her task with a determination that I admired but did not feel inclined to emulate. I followed her with my torch. ‘It would help if we knew what we're looking for.'

‘We'll know it when we see it.'

But I wasn't as convinced as she was and hung back until she looked over her shoulder as she knelt at a pile of magazines and said, ‘Come on.'

She turned back to her work and I did my thing with the pictures on the walls because that seemed to me to be the kind of thing that burglars and spies did. I was looking for pieces of paper stuck behind them, I think, not safes.

Certainly not safes.

So imagine my surprise . . .

‘Bloody hell!'

Max looked up. I was standing in front of the chimney piece and had been looking behind an industrial landscape – the kind of thing that conjured up visions of the Poor Laws and Utilitarianism – which I was now taking off the wall to reveal a safe. It was only about a foot long and eight inches high, its metal door painted a kind of dull red and it had a small dial by which to input the combination. It was embedded in the chimney breast above a strikingly unfashionable gas fire.

Max came over at once. ‘See,' she said triumphantly. ‘I told you.'

‘Told me what?'

‘I knew we'd find something.'

I found that I couldn't follow in her enthusiasm. ‘So? We've found a safe. What does that mean?'

‘Whatever's in there is obviously important.'

‘Or valuable.'

‘Or valuable,' she agreed.

‘So how do we get in to find out?'

She pulled at the handle; it didn't budge. ‘Can you open it?'

She saw from the look on my face that I couldn't. Having wasted a few seconds with her ear to the red of the metal whilst she twiddled the knob, she stepped away from it with a sigh. ‘It's in there, I know it is.'

I didn't ask her what, because I knew that she didn't know; she was just convinced that it held a secret –
the
secret – and that if we could get at it, then all would be revealed. I was thinking that maybe she was right but, equally likely, maybe it held Doris Lightoller's spare pair of dentures and enough books of Green Shield stamps to buy one of those new video recorders I kept hearing so much about. It meant a lot to Max, though, and I said nothing other than, ‘We should carry on searching. There might be more to find.'

‘Yes,' she said after a pause in which she just stared at the safe as if willing it to roll over, which is what I had a tendency to do when she looked at me with those big, big eyes. We resumed the search and this time, because I wanted her to be happy, I joined in with rather more gusto than previously.

I found the file at the back of a sideboard that looked old and roughly made, perhaps out of ship's timbers or something. It was in the middle of a pile of old seventy-eights, sandwiched between Dame Nelly Melba wrestling with ‘Ave Maria' and the Jerusalem Philharmonic doing a job on the ‘Brandenburg Concertos'. I thought nothing of it at first, until I opened the flap, whereupon I stood up at once and said in an urgent whisper – we were whispering the whole time – to Max, ‘Come over here.'

She put down a brass Russian-style teapot that she had been staring into and complied.

‘Wow!'

Wow, indeed. The first item was a report from a private detective agency by the imposing name of A.J. and J.A. Moss, Consulting Detectives. Their office was in Brixton and their headed notepaper claimed that they had associates in New York, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Sydney. The somewhat impressive effect that all this produced was somewhat nullified by their interesting spelling of the Australian city, which was rendered as ‘Sidney'. The body of the report detailed the comings and goings of the two shops on either side of Oliver Lightoller's, more precisely the relationship between Samuel James Metcalfe Hocking and Mrs Aurelia Jane Parrish. There was a detailed description of their activities over the period of a month and, for the doubters, a comprehensive set of photographs, many shot with a telephoto lens. They had been taken from over the road, presumably from a first-floor flat, because they peered into a bedroom above Mr Hocking's bakery emporium. In the throes of passion, Mr Hocking had made a poor job of drawing his curtains and what he and Mrs Parrish got up to with a cream cone was clearly seen in all its comestible glory.

‘Good Lord,' said Max.

‘I think I know how he got a bad back.'

She looked again, as if unable to believe it all, then: ‘So that's what Mr Hocking wanted.'

‘Looks like it.'

‘You realize what this means?'

I nodded but before I could say anything, I caught sight of a shadow moving across the curtains. Someone was walking up the path to the front door.

TWENTY-FOUR

W
ith frantic signing, I got Max to follow my lead and switch off her torch. Then we stood as still as we could, wondering what was going to happen.

Max whispered, ‘Perhaps it's just a policeman checking the house.'

I thought, What if he checks around the back? I only pulled the doors to; it'll be obvious that someone's broken in.

The shape went to the front door and I suddenly wondered if maybe this wasn't a policeman after all . . .

I said in an urgent whisper, ‘Come on,' and with that pulled her out of the front room and into the hallway as quickly and quietly as I could, bending low and trying to avoid passing pieces of bric-a-brac. A vague shadow could be made out through the frosted glass of the front door, backlit by a street lamp, and as we passed it, there came the sound of a key being inserted in the lock. I pushed Max up the stairs and followed as quickly as I could; behind me, I heard the front door open just as we made it to the top, the place where Doris Lightoller had met her manufacturer.

We crouched down side by side on the landing and peered together through the banisters, terrified lest whoever it was should start to come up the stairs. Max was crushed against me, soft and fragrant in a uniquely feminine way; had it been anywhere, anytime else, it would have been wonderful.

But it was here and now, and intensely frightening.

The newcomer, though, did not come up the stairs; the front door opened and closed again very quickly; then we heard whoever it was move away from the bottom of the stairs and I felt Max's body soften in relaxation. For a few moments I wasn't sure where the intruder had gone, but then we heard the sound of hinges squeaking.

Max looked at me, her face illumined by comprehension. She mouthed something at me that at first I didn't catch, then deciphered as: ‘The safe.'

No more than two minutes passed before we heard movement back in the hallway; I held my breath hoping that I would very soon hear the front door opening, but for a minute or two there was just silence. In my head, in my ears, the silence screamed; what was happening down there? Would we soon hear the sound of feet upon the stairs?

Well, no, we didn't, but it still wasn't good news. The pattern of sounds from the ground floor told us that our visitor was going into the back room. I looked across at Max and from her expression it was clear that she understood the import of this: the signs of our incompetent break-in would be easily discovered.

We waited again, the sounds now slightly more distant; it was when they stopped completely that we both knew we had been discovered. What would happen now? I could feel my heart accelerating, my mouth becoming dry, gut beginning to churn. The sounds of movement began again, but this time with more purpose; whoever it was, was now looking for us.

Beside me, Max shifted nervously. The newcomer came into the hallway and I began to make plans about what I would do when, inevitably, they came up the stairs: jump out and push them back down again seemed to me the likeliest to succeed.

The noises became slightly but imperceptibly louder with every second that passed. I could feel Max becoming more and more nervous, whilst my own fear was now so huge it was practically blowing steam through my ears. When I heard the first creak of a footfall on the stairs, I only just stopped a squeal from making a run for freedom from my vocal cords.

When I heard the second, I feared for the sanctity of my underpants.

When I heard the third . . .

The front door was rattled and, moreover, rattled quite violently.

There were no more creaks.

The rattle came again and through the banisters I could see the beam of a torch sweep across the wall, making constantly changing quadrilateral shapes. There was a rustle as the figure crouched down.