From looking obstinate and mardy he turned sarcastic: “I just don’t see how it can be that you and I have acquaintances in common.”
I put more wood on the fire. “You wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. You couldn’t have stumbled on this place by accident. Moggerhanger told me that if I found anyone here they had to be from the Green Toe Gang, and I was to all but kill whoever it was.” I looked into his shifting eyes. “You’ve just eaten your execution breakfast, even though it’s teatime.”
He stood up, and ran to the stairfoot, followed by Dismal. “No, please. I don’t belong to them.”
“But you know about such a mob?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I honed my voice to razor sharp: “Sic him!”
Dismal pushed him down, sat on his legs, and stared him in the eye. “He really is partial to human beings,” I said, “and he hasn’t had a tin of dog food for a couple of hours, though I don’t suppose your flesh would taste like the finest canine caviar.”
Dismal farted so close to his face it was assumed I’d given him the nod, a slur on my eternally good nature, though I was amused at his twisted lips, as if about to throw up. “I’d be only too glad to tell you what you want to know, if I knew what it was you wanted to know.”
He had been sent on a recce to Peppercorn Cottage by someone who had been here before, and that was Wayland Smith, when he was held prisoner for a few days because Percy Blemish, the temporary caretaker, had caught him sniffing around for evidence of Moggerhanger’s drug dealings. “Listen, Sunshine, I’m losing patience. If you don’t tell me sharpish who sent you I’ll do something I won’t tell you about first. But you won’t have many teeth left by the time I’m finished.” I was silent, idled the poker in the fire and, when the tip glowed, lit another cigar. “Are you ready to talk?”
I called Dismal off, who then did what he liked best, sloping out his length before the fire. “Come back and sit down,” I said to the interloper, “but no more nonsense. Tell me what I want to know.”
I felt like floorclothing the smile off his mug when he said: “I was sent up here by a friend of mine called Wayland Smith. He’d heard of a merger between Lord Moggerhanger and the Green Toe Gang, who deal mostly with the drug routes of the Continent. Moggerhanger wants to get in on it.”
This was no surprise. “When did you hear that?”
“A few weeks ago. Wayland told me.”
It was before I set out on my errand to Greece, Moggerhanger wanting to find out how the Green Toe Gang would deal with me. Maybe he now considered them so incompetent in their endeavours that he would be less likely to seek a merger, no matter what Wayland Smith assumed. “So he sent you up here to look for evidence? There isn’t any. Tell him that. And tell him as well that he’s a right prick, with his investigative journalism, as he calls it. He’s a little boy with a toy he can’t let go of, only it’s not a toy, and if he doesn’t take his snipe nose out of things it’ll blow up in his smarmy mug. If I was you I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He only wants everybody off drugs so’s he can feed them the opium of communism. But you can tell him from me that the only place he’ll get the gen on the Green Toe Gang will be in Amsterdam. As for Moggerhanger, tell him to try his luck at Spleen Manor in Yorkshire. I’m not sure he knows about that place, but I don’t mind if you put him in the picture, because if he goes there he’ll come away with his head on back to front. Now get out of this cottage, before I do you in.”
He looked suitably appalled: “I’ll tell Wayland what you said. But I can’t go out in this rain, can I? It’s getting dark as well.”
“I didn’t suppose you came without an umbrella and an overcoat, so get your gear from upstairs, and be out in five minutes. Tell Wayland Smith I don’t reckon much of the script he made you learn. I could have written a much better one myself. And tell him as well I’ll punch his commissar clock next time I see him in The Hair of the Dog.”
He trod downstairs clad for the weather, and I watched him out of the door, Dismal’s tail wagging with pleasure to see him go. But he came back half a minute later because the rain was belting down: “Can I call a taxi? I have the number.”
“So that was how you got here? All right, but have him meet you at the paved road,” I said as he dialled. “You’ll be just in time if you leave now.” I couldn’t wait to get shot of the fool, all but pushing him out this time, sorry to see the rain lessening slightly as I closed the door after him. A rat had come out of its hole, maybe to see him off, and the shot from my air pistol that sent it squeaking away fetched a neat hole in the plaster.
As I prepared a supper of sausages, bacon, beans and fried bread, Dismal nuzzled my ankles, and salivated at smells that cottages were built for. The rain sluiced down, and though increasing the water supply — as if I needed it — it would suitably soak daft Peter on his traipse to the taxi. Better still, I thought, if he disappeared without trace crossing the bog at the bottom of the lane.
I put a bowl of tea on the floor for Dismal, and half a dozen chocolate biscuits as his aperitif. Though he hadn’t so far saved my life he had sometimes guarded my sanity, so had to be rewarded with the best treatment. After our feed I went upstairs, and didn’t much like finding both beds covered with multicoloured rags as if half a ton of Smarties had been poured from an invisible chute in the ceiling. I heaped them into a corner, deciding to bed down by the fire, and not even look into the smaller room that the shepherd’s eight children must have slept in a hundred years ago.
The noise of the telephone was a shock, and I let it ring, assuming it couldn’t have anything to do with me. But who was whoever it was trying to get in touch with? I worried for a moment, to think anyone imagined there could be anyone here to speak to. I would answer if it went three times, but it didn’t, so I sat by the fire with Dismal, satisfying my intellectual requirements with a Sidney Blood called The Morbid Cellar, recognising the pen of Gilbert Blaskin in the first chapter, others interspersed by less literate ramblings from Bill Straw, and a few parts written by myself. Neither Kenny Dukes, nor any other Sidney Blood aficionado would spot the different styles as they lapped it up. I threw the rubbishy tome into the fire, which almost put it out.
Then I took up one which I could tell had been scribed by Ronald Delphick, and had to read the first chapter twice before getting the drift of his prose, plain in one way, till I sensed a hidden meaning or message and, pulling a sheet of paper from the shelf, and taking out a fancy ballpoint that Frances had given me as a birthday present, I toyed with the first letter of every second word, stringing them out in such a way that they began to make sense. They told me something about Delphick which he must have thought no one would ever be able to fathom but which I, my head thrown back for a big laugh, would one day be able to use against him.
I was shocked out of my intellectual effort by the phone ringing again, Dismal’s big intimidating eyes asking me to answer it in case whoever called might give notice of a hamper to be delivered tomorrow from Harrod’s, but I threw him a biscuit and told him it was no concern of his.
When I suggested another fry up he almost knocked my chair over in a hurry to get at the pan. It was nearly midnight, but we glutted ourselves, the room dim with the homely miasma of bacon and toast. I wondered how long I’d be in residence, thought it could even be weeks, in which case I’d be dragging logs in for the fire, and having the gas bottle changed, though in summer the place would still be damp, set as it was between hillsides and a stream outside the door.