The Throwback (22 page)

Nobody else could find a simple solution to the problem of what had occurred in East Pursley. The discovery by an army helicopter of the Superintendent of Police hanging to the upper branches of a monkey-puzzle tree which would have defied the efforts of any but the most insane men to climb it didn’t help to clarify matters. He kept screaming about mad dogs being loose in the neighbourhood and his statement was supported by Mr Pettigrew and the Lowrys who had wounds to prove it.

‘It hardly explains how six golfers and five of my own men came to be shot,’ said the Commissioner of Police. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the midday sun but the former don’t carry side-arms. And what the hell do we say about that fire engine and the petrol tanker, not to mention the London to Brighton express? How many passengers went west in that inferno?’

‘Ten,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘though accurately speaking they were going south. The Southern Region caters …’

‘Shut up,’ snarled the Commissioner, ‘I’ve got to explain this to the Home Secretary and it’s got to sound good.’

‘Well, I suppose we could divide the two incidents
into separate areas,’ suggested the Assistant Commissioner, but the Commissioner only looked at him the more lividly.

‘Two? Two?’ he yelled, rattling the windows of his office. ‘One, we have an utterly insane half-pay colonel whittling his prick with a cheese-grater in the company of a high-class whore. Two, we have a mad dog roaming the district biting everything in sight. Three, someone looses off firearms into several houses and then explodes a fucking garage with an unidentifiable woman in the inspection pit. Do I have to spell it
all
out for you?’

‘I take your point,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘which according to Miss Gigi Lamont is what Colonel Finch-Potter …’

‘Shut up,’ said the Commissioner savagely, and crossed his legs. They sat in silence and considered a convincing explanation.

‘At least the TV people and the press weren’t present,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, and his superior nodded thankfully.

‘What about blaming the IRA?’

‘And give them something else to boast about? You must be out of your tiny mind.’

‘Well, they did blow up Mr O’Brain’s house,’ said the AC.

‘Nonsense. The sod blew himself up. There wasn’t a trace of explosive in the house,’ said the Commissioner, ‘he was fiddling with the gas stove …’

‘But he wasn’t connected to the gas main …’ the AC began.

‘And I won’t be connected to my job unless we come up with something before noon,’ shouted the Commissioner. ‘First of all we’ve got to stop the press going in there and asking questions. Got any ideas on the subject?’

The Assistant Commissioner considered the problem. ‘I don’t suppose we could say the mad dogs had rabies,’ he said finally. ‘I mean, we could put the area in quarantine and shoot anything—’

‘We’ve already shot half the police in that patch,’ said the Commissioner, ‘and while I’m inclined to agree that they were mad you still don’t go round shooting people who’ve contracted rabies. You inoculate the brutes. Still, it would serve to keep the press and the media out. And how do you explain the six bleeding golfers? Just because some fool slices his drive you don’t have a drive to slice him and five others with multiple gunshot wounds. We’ve got to come up with some logical explanation.’

‘Sticking to the rabies theory,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘if one of our men contracted rabies and went berserk—’

‘You can’t contract rabies instantaneously. It takes weeks to come out.’

‘But if there were a special sort of rabies, a new variety like swine fever,’ persisted the Assistant. ‘The dog bites the Colonel—’

‘That’s out for a start. There’s no evidence that anybody bit Colonel Finch-Fucking-Potter except himself and that in an anatomically impossible place unless the bastard was a contortionist as well as a pervert.’

‘But he’s not in a fit condition to deny the rabies theory,’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘He’s clean off his rocker.’

‘Not the only thing he’s off,’ muttered the Commissioner, ‘but all right, go on.’

‘We start with galloping rabies and the dog and everything follows quite logically. The armed squad go off their heads and start shooting—’

‘That’s going to sound great on the nine o’clock news. “Five officers of the Special Squad, organized to protect foreign diplomats, this morning went mad and shot six golfers on the East Pursley Golf Course.” I know there’s no such thing as bad publicity but in this case I have my doubts.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be announced on the news,’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘In a case of this sort we invoke the Official Secrets Act.’

The Commissioner nodded approvingly. ‘We’d need the cooperation of the War Office for that,’ he said.

‘Well, those helicopters could have come from Porton Down and the Biological Warfare Research Station is there.’

‘They just happen to have come from somewhere else, and anyway they came after the show was over.’

‘But they don’t know that,’ said the Assistant Commissioner,
‘and you know how dim the Army Command is. The main thing is that we can threaten to put the blame on them and …’

In the end it was agreed at a Joint Meeting of the Home Secretary, the Minister of Defence and the Commissioner of Police that the happenings at Sandicott Crescent were subject to official silence and, invoking the Defence of the Realm Act together with the Official Secrets Act, the editors of all papers were ordered not to publicize the tragedy. The BBC and ITV were similarly warned and the news that night contained only the story of the petrol tanker that had exploded and set the London to Brighton express on fire in the process. Sandicott Crescent was sealed off and army marksmen went through the bird sanctuary with rifles killing anything that moved as an exercise in stopping the spread of rabies. They found only birds and from a sanctuary the wood became a mortuary. Fortunately for the bull-terrier it didn’t move. It slept on and on outside the Colonel’s kitchen door. It was about the only creature apart from Lockhart and Jessica who didn’t move. Mr Grabble, driven from his house by the upsurge of the sewer, handed in his notice that afternoon wearing a pair of bedroom slippers over his chemically cauterized feet. Mr Rickenshaw finally managed to get his wife to hospital and the Pettigrews spent the afternoon packing. They too left before dark. The Lowrys had already left and
were being given rabies inoculations in the company of several firemen, the Superintendent and a number of his men at the local isolation hospital. Even Mrs Simplon had gone, in a small sinister plastic bag which so upset Mrs Ogilvie that she had to be sedated.

‘There’s only us left,’ she moaned, ‘everyone else has gone. I want to go too. All those dead men lying out there … I’ll never be able to look out at the golf course without seeing them on the dogleg ninth.’

This remark put Mr Ogilvie in mind of both dogs and legs. He too would never feel the same about Sandicott Crescent. A week later they too left and Lockhart and Jessica could look out their bedroom window at eleven empty houses, each standing (with the exception of Mr O’Brain’s Bauhaus, which had slumped somewhat) in substantial and well-kept grounds in an apparently desirable neighbourhood within easy reach of London and adjoining an excellent golf club whose waiting list had been conveniently shortened by recent events. As the builders moved in to restore the houses to their pristine state, and in the case of Mr Grabble’s to a sanitary one, Lockhart had time to turn his attention to other things.

There was, for instance, the little matter of Miss Genevieve Goldring’s forthcoming novel,
Song of the Heart
, to be considered. Lockhart took to buying the
Bookseller
to check when it was due to be published. Since Miss Goldring managed to write five books a year under various pseudonyms, her publishers were forced
by the impetus of her output to bring out two Goldring books in the same period. There was a Spring List Goldring novel and an Autumn one.
Song of the Heart
appeared in the Autumn List and came out in October. Lockhart and Jessica watched it climb from nine on the best-sellers list to two within three weeks and finally to Top. It was then that Lockhart struck. He travelled to London with a copy of the novel and spent part of an afternoon in the office of the younger of the two Giblings, and the rest of it in the office of the older with young Mr Gibling in attendance. By the time he left, the Giblings were in transports of legal rhapsody. Never in all their experience, and old Mr Gibling had had a great deal of experience in matters concerning libel, never had they come across a more blatant and outrageously wicked libel. Better still, Miss Genevieve Goldring’s publishers were immensely rich, thanks in large part to her popularity, and now they were going to be immensely generous out of court in their settlement, thanks to Miss Goldring’s wicked libel, or best of all they would be immensely stupid and fight the case in court, a prospect so eminently to be desired that Mr and Mr Gibling proceeded with a delicate hesitancy that was calculated to allure.

They wrote politely to Messrs Shortstead, Publishers, of Edgware Road, apprising them of an unfortunate fact that had been brought to their notice by a client, one Mr Lockhart Flawse, that his name appeared in that extremely successful novel,
Song of the Heart
, by Miss Genevieve Goldring and published by Messrs Shortstead,
and that in consequence of this unfortunate error they were forced into the regrettable course of having to request Messrs Shortstead to make good the damage done to the private, professional and marital reputation of Mr Flawse by the aspersions cast on his character in the book by a financial payment and legal costs, at the same time withdrawing all copies unsold from circulation and destroying them.

‘That should set the trap,’ said Mr Gibling to Mr Gibling. ‘It is to be devoutly hoped that they will employ the services of some up-and-coming young man in our profession who will advise them to contest.’

Messrs Shortstead did. The reply from the least senior member of the firm of solicitors, Coole, Poole, Stoole and Folsom and Partners, one Mr Arbutus, stated that while Messrs Shortstead and the author of
Song of the Heart
, hereafter termed the novel, were prepared to offer Mr Flawse their apologies and his legal costs and if necessary some small sum for his pain and injury, they were in no way obliged nor would consider much less agree to the withdrawal of all unsold copies, etc. The letter ended on the cordial note that Coole, Poole, Stoole and Folsom and Partners looked forward to hearing from Mr Gibling. Mr Gibling and Mr Gibling rather doubted it. They held the matter in abeyance for a fortnight and then struck.

‘Four hundred thousand pounds damages? Do my ears deceive me?’ said Mr Folsom when Mr Arbutus showed him their reply. ‘I have never in all my career read
anything so monstrous. Giblings have gone mad. Of course we will contest.’

‘Contest?’ said Mr Arbutus. ‘They must have something …’

‘Bluff, boy, bluff,’ said Mr Folsom, ‘I haven’t read the book of course but such a sum is unheard of in innocent libel. Come to that, it’s unheard of in deliberate libel. Probably a typist’s error.’

But for once Mr Folsom erred. Mr Shortstead, taking his advice, instead of his own intuition which told him that
Song of the Heart
was a little different in tone from Miss Goldring’s other numerous novels, instructed Mr Arbutus to answer in kind and, reversing the natural order of things, to tell Mr Gibling and Mr Gibling to sue and be damned. And next day on the third floor of Blackstone’s House, Lincoln’s Inn, London, when the mail was brought before him and opened by the senior clerk, that aged and austere gentleman discovered for the very first time in his life that Mr Gibling the elder could do the hornpipe very creditably on his desktop; having done so be demanded the immediate production of two, no, three bottles of the best champagne to be sent for at no matter what cost.

‘We have them by the nose,’ he sang gleefully when Mr Gibling the younger arrived. ‘O Lord that I should live to see this day. The nose, brother o’ mine, the nose. Read it again. I must hear it.’

And Mr Gibling trembled in litigious ecstasy as the words ‘sue and be damned’ quivered in the air.

‘Sue and be damned,’ he gibbered. ‘Sue and be damned. I can hardly wait to hear that threat pronounced by counsel in court. Ah, the judge’s face. The beauty, brother, the beauty of it all. The legal life is not without its precious moments. Let us savour the pleasure of this splendid day.’

Mr Partington, the senior clerk, brought in the champagne and Mr Gibling and Mr Gibling sent him to fetch a third glass. Only then did they solemnly toast Mr Lockhart Flawse of 12 Sandicott Crescent for stepping so simultaneously into their lives and out of the pages of Miss Genevieve Goldring’s novel with its oh-so-appropriate title. That day there was little work done in Blackstone’s House, Lincoln’s Inn. The drawing-up of writs is not an arduous job and the one issued by Gibling and Gibling between Lockhart Flawse, Plaintiff, and Genevieve Goldring and Messrs Shortstead, Defendants, was no different from other writs and merely stated that Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Our other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith; To Genevieve Goldring properly named Miss Magster c/o Messrs Shortstead … ‘WE COMMAND YOU that within fourteen days after the service of this Writ on you, inclusive of the day of service, you do cause an appearance to be entered for you in an action at the suit of Lockhart Flawse and take notice that in default of you
doing so the Plaintiff may proceed therein, and judgement may be given in your absence.’

It was served the following day and caused little consternation in the offices of Messrs Shortstead and a great deal in those of Coole, Poole, Stoole and Folsom and Partners where Mr Arbutus, having read
Song of the Heart
, had discovered the horrid nature of the libel published on the aforesaid Lockhart Flawse; namely that he made a habit of being tied by his wife to the bed and being whipped by his wife, Jessica, and vice versa, and when not whipping or being whipped, stole money from banks in the process of which he shot dead several bank cashiers.