Flowers on the Grass (22 page)

He would draw this chap out now, cunning, get him to give himself away without knowing that George had caught on. Useful later for evidence.

“Smoke?” he suggested.

“What?” The other jumped. “Sorry, I was asleep.”

Oh, were you, my lad? Foxing, more like. People don’t sleep when they’re on the run. “I said, what about a smoke?”

“Sure. Have one of mine.” He put his hand in his pocket, but George got his packet out first. No one was going to catch him with doped cigarettes, though Dick Barton himself had fallen for one only last week.

When they had lit up with the chap’s silver lighter, that looked stolen all right, George blew out a cloud of smoke. He couldn’t do it through his nostrils because the doctor had dared him to inhale, but he put on a voice as casual as if he had.

“Going up after a job?”

“Sort of. I’ve got to go to a holiday camp to do some sketches of happy campers for publicity. My firm handles their advertising.”

Well, it came out glib enough, but it sounded fishy to George. Whoever heard of going nearly three hundred miles to draw pictures of people when you could just as well get snaps?

Going over the bridge at Wetherby, the chap yawned and said: “Any chance of a cup of tea soon? I feel like death.”

It gave George quite a turn to hear him say that. Harping on the subject. They always did. George was not keen to stop anywhere, for fear that someone else might spot Austin Clay Maverick and rob him of his prize. They had to get juice, however, and when he stopped by the pumps at Meggy’s All-night Pull-in, the chap had climbed out of the lorry and was away into the café before George could say “Give us eight” to Bob, looming sleepily up by his window.

When he went inside, he found that the chap had bought him tea and bangers and mash. Decent of him. George was hungry and he weighed in, but suddenly, between one chew and the next, his jaw stopped working and the next mouthful was arrested on his fork half-way to his mouth.

Bought with dead man’s money
. As he stared at his plate in horror, the sausages seemed to be dismembered fingers; the mashed potato was brains spilling out of a head; the gravy was rich, sluggish-oozing blood.

He clattered down his knife and fork, pushed the plate away and took out his cigarettes.

“What’s up?” the chap asked, eating happily. “Can’t you take it?”

“Sorry,” said George in a jerky voice. “I don’t fancy it just now. It’s my ulcer. Chronic.”

“Oh, bad luck. All drivers get them in the end, don’t they?”

George did not like to hear him say that. His duodenal was something that made him individual. The chap had said that with an air of knowing a thing or two about medicine. He remembered that the morning papers had said: “
The body had apparently been dismembered by someone with an expert knowledge of anatomy.”
Medical knowledge. There you were.

“Come on.” He got up. “Let’s get going.” The sooner he turned him in the better. Driving on, he planned what he was going to do. He had got to get to Middlesbrough. That was more important than anything, murderers included, because it meant his job, and with a wife like Edie and three kids bursting out of their clothes like ripe chestnuts you couldn’t take chances. He would tell Maverick—he thought of him now as that— that he was driving him to the station, and that was one hell of a joke, because it would be a station, but not one with rails and
a ticket office. Tickle Uncle, that would. He would tell it him tomorrow on the way home.

Tomorrow everyone in England would know George’s name. From café to café all along the Great North Road the word would pass: “Old George Bolton. Who’d have thought it? He was here, you know. Here with
him
! Talk about nerve….. Never so much as wink an eyelid he didn’t, though he knew he was riding with a killer. Plucky as they come… . Here he is, boys! Give him a cheer. Good Old George—what’ll it be? This is on the house.”

He saw it all. Back in London the boss would grunt—he wouldn’t raise a smile; that would crack his face—“Good work, Bolton. Proud of you. Like to show our appreciation.” With that and the police reward he might get enough to retire. He and Edie could go to Letchworth garden village. George had driven through it once and never forgotten the clean toy houses with neat gardens, which looked as though the town council had banned dirt and weeds when they banned alcohol.

And Edie—what would she say? She would read about it in the paper before he got home. The whole street would have read it. They might even be decked out in welcome like they were when Mrs. Slater’s Joe came home after getting his medal at Buckingham Palace. The kids wouldn’t be at school Saturday. They might be watching in the street for him. And Edie, she might—there was just a chance she might—run out, too, and jump at him with her arms flung wide and her mouth soft for a kiss, like she used to do once, long ago before they had the kids.

George’s thoughts travelled on, faster than the trundling lorry. Maverick was asleep. Good thing. George would try and keep him sleeping until he drew up outside Middlesbrough police station with a squeal of brakes fit to wake the dead, grabbed Maverick in a bear hug while he was still fuddled, and yelled like mad for help. If he woke before, and turned suspicious, George would simply drive straight up to the first policeman, shout: “Get him—he’s the tattoo slayer!” and leave the rest to the copper. Any copper would do. As a law-abiding citizen, George had as trusting a faith in them all as in the Almighty.

His mind elsewhere, he drove automatically along the road he knew so well. The tarmac rolled towards and under him like a black ribbon. He steered unthinkingly by the cat’s-eye
centre markings which were fading now as the night cleared away, taking with it the brightness of his headlamps. He dreamed on into the future. He was at the trial now, giving evidence in his new brown suit. Edie was there, proud of him in a flowered hat instead of the turban scarf she always wore. The barrister shouted some mad mumble that rang in his ears without words, and George knew he was falling asleep. He was broad awake in the split of a moment, and wrenched the lorry back to the left of the road, but soon the dreaded heaviness crept back. He blinked and squinted, shifted his position, gripped the wheel tight and sat stiffly upright, counted all the towns he knew beginning with B, went over the form for the runners of the Two Thousand Guineas, banged the side of his head with his fist. All those things one used to try desperately, driving in convoy during the war, until, like magic, they stopped the column just in time and you were made to get out, cursing, and run up and down in the cold night.

“What’s up?” Maverick was awake. Cunning brute. Probably been awake all the time with his eyes shut. “Why are you knocking yourself about?”

“I had a itch.” Wouldn’t do to say you were sleepy, sitting next to a murderer.

“Some itch,” he said, “that needs all that hammering. Want me to do it for you?”

He would, too, as soon as look at you. All right, cock. Have your little joke. In two hours’ time you’ll make no more.

It was getting lighter every minute now, and for a moment George had a pang and a sadness to think that, because of him, this man would not see the early-morning sky any more, except through bars. George had seen many dawns, but he never failed to enjoy the moment when all at once it wasn’t the ending of night but the beginning of day. It made him feel like a poet, though he could never make words of it. Once he had tried to describe it for Edie. “You should see it, E.,” he had said, and she had snapped back: “Think I’ve got so little to do all day I can stay up all night to see the sun come up? There’s some as can, no doubt. Thank you very much. Not me.”

To the right the sky was getting that queer colour before it went pink. George jerked his head. “If you’re a painter,”
he said, “how’d you set about getting them colours down now?”

“Well,” said the other, “I’d have a bash at mixing gr—g——”

Got you now! George could have cried it aloud in triumph. I knew you were no more a painter than my foot. All that fishy talk about advertisements, and now you stammer and flounder about at the first mention of a colour.

“I knew then,” he would say in the statement to the police, and the reporters’ pencils would go scribble, scribble. “If you’re an artist,” I said to myself, “I’m a murderer.” Ha, ha, they’d go, with the willing laughter they always give to someone famous.

“Green,” Maverick suddenly said, finishing his sentence. “That’s the dominant colour. Sorry. I always stammer when I’m tired. Chronic. Like your ulcer.”

I’ll teach you to make jokes about my ulcer, thought George, making his lips grim. He felt so powerful that he risked pulling in to Mac’s at Thirsk for a last cup of tea. Heaven knows when he’d get the next, with all the business there’d be at the police station. Maverick must take him for a mug to go with him into the café so calmly, so sure of being unsuspected. George rolled in his walk. It was too easy. He was as sure of him now as if he had him handcuffed.

He looked at those hands breaking up a roil and thought that they soon would be. Those hands had—ugh! You couldn’t bring yourself to think of it. Doing to human flesh what they were doing to the roll. You could always tell with those long fingers, square nails and knobbly knuckles. That came to George on the spur of the moment, but it seemed so true that he thought he must have read it somewhere. “I knew at once,” he would tell the reporters, “when I saw his hands. Killer’s hands, I said to myself, I said.”

The radio stopped talking about Shannon, Fastnet, Irish Sea and gave six pips. Seven-o’clock news. Time to get going if they were to make Middlesbrough by eight.

“… Austin Clay Maverick, who disappeared yesterday after being questioned by the police, was found last night at a cinema in Welwyn Garden City and arrested on a charge of murder. Miss Muriel Popham, who was on duty in the cash desk, recognised him when he bought a ticket and telephoned the police.”

“Smart girl,” said Mav—— No. George’s mind tumbled away from the name as if it was falling downstairs.

“I dunno, lad,” Mac said. “’Tis easy. You or I could have done it—or even old George there. You can always spot a murderer.”

Dickie was only properly alive from Easter to October. The rest of the year he was dormant, waiting like a hibernating animal for the opening of the holiday camp to bring him into the sunlight of his best self.

He had been one of the hosts at the Gaydays Holiday Camp for three years. Blue Boys, they were called, because they wore white slacks and bright-blue sweaters, and their job was to go round organising everybody into having a good time. Dickie, who followed the stars in the Sunday papers, had applied for the job on a propitious day. He thought that must be why he had got it, for he had no particular talents. He was not handsome like Larry, nor a great joker like Barney, a tennis champion like Pete, an acrobat like Johnny, an accordian wizard like Kenny. But he tried very hard at being an all-rounder with a bit of something for everybody. He never relaxed all season or took any extra off-duty, and with his smile that was so broad it seemed to be hooked round his ears he kept to the spirit of the camp as conscientiously as even Captain Gallagher, that stickler for “Gaydays Atmosphere”, could wish. So while other more dilettante Blue Boys came and went, Dickie was back on the job year after year, and campers who had been there before were glad, when they arrived, to be able to shout: “Hey there, Dickie!” and show off a little to friends who were new to the camp.

When the camp closed in September, and most of the staff said Thank God, Dickie was not happy. He put on ordinary, towny clothes again and went back to his room in Earl’s Court, hoping, but not expecting, to find it cleaned of the traces of its summer lodger. He lived as long as he could on his summer’s earnings, and then, with his money gone and
his tan faded, took a Christmas job at the post office, or as an extra assistant for the shopping rush. After that, if he was lucky, there might be a few days of crowd work in films to keep him going until he could earn his six pounds a week demonstrating something at the Ideal Home Exhibition. With the first buds of spring, his smile began to creep to his ears again, for it was time to get his white slacks cleaned and his jerseys washed and to buy a new pair of shorts and some snappy swimming trunks. When blossom was on the almond trees, he was heading happily for Whitby to be Dickie again to all comers, a successful somebody, a feature of the place, instead of a nonentity struggling to keep afloat among the rest of the unskilled driftwood of London.

In the winter there were only a few people who knew that he existed. In the summer, among eight hundred people he was one of the twelve most popular. Besides the Blue Boys, there were six Green Girls, who wore white skirts and green sweaters with built-in brassieres, were beautiful and gay, kind to old ladies and little children and healthily tolerant of anyone who wanted to feel a bit of a dog.

The Girls and Boys had glamour. It went with the job. Dickie, who knew that he had no glamour in winter, put it on with his uniform and was a new man. Although, as Captain Gallagher stressed in monthly pep-talks, the campers must be to them the most important people, the Blue Boys were invested with a golden aura that made them seem important to the campers. They had been deliberately and subtly built up, not so far as to be out of reach, but so that people should feel gratified to discover that these supermen were so breezily friendly that each camper seemed to be the one thing on earth that mattered to a Blue Boy.

On Easter Saturday morning all was well with Dickie’s world. After the long limbo of the winter, he was alive again. The camp was full, with no hooligans, or carping snoopers who stood about in groups and hats making no attempt to look anything but Government. All the coloured woodwork was freshly painted, blossom was on the cherry trees between the rows of cabins, Dickie’s clothes felt clean and light and his summer was before him. The sun shone and the sea sparkled, although hardly anyone went in it, with the swimming pool so much handier.