The Throwback Page 12

  ‘A girl in our office had been working for her and she says she’s really weird,’ Jessica continued. ‘She walks up and down the room and talks and Patsy just has to sit at the typewriter and write down everything she says.’

  ‘Must be boring work,’ said Lockhart, who had decided lead shot would be overdoing things a bit.

  ‘And do you know what? Patsy’s going to let me go and work over there in her place tomorrow. She wants the day off and they haven’t found a job for me. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘It’s marvellous. I’ve always wanted to meet a real live author.’

  ‘Won’t this Goldring woman want to know why Patsy hasn’t come?’ asked Lockhart.

  ‘She doesn’t even know Patsy’s name. She’s so inspired she just starts talking as soon as Patsy comes and they work in a garden shed that revolves to catch the sun. I’m so excited. I can’t wait.’

  *

  Nor could Mr Simplon and the Revd Truster. Their appearance in court had been brief and they had been released on bail to await trial. Mr Simplon returned home in clothes borrowed from the body of a tramp who had died the previous week. He was almost unrecognizable and certainly not by Mrs Simplon, who not only refused him entry to her house but had locked the garage. Mr Simplon’s subsequent action of breaking a back window in his own house had been met by the contents of a bottle of ammonia and a further visit to the police station on a charge of making a public nuisance of himself. The Revd Truster’s reception had been more gentle and understanding, Mrs Truster’s understanding being that her husband was a homosexual and that far from being a crime homosexuality was simply a freak of nature. The Revd Truster resented the imputation and said so. Mrs Truster pointed out that she was merely repeating his own words in a sermon on the subject. The Revd Truster retorted that he wished to God he’d never given that damned sermon. Mrs Truster had asked why, if he felt so strongly on the matter of being a fag, he had ever … The Revd Truster told her to shut up. Mrs Truster didn’t. In short, discord reigned almost as cruelly as it did in the Grabble household, where Mrs Grabble finally packed her bags and took a taxi to the station to go to her mother in Hendon. Next door the Misses Musgrove shook their heads sadly and spoke softly of the wickedness of the modern world while speculating separately on the size, shape and subsequent colour change of Mr Simplon’s genitalia. It was the first glimpse they had ever had of a naked man and those parts which played so large a role, they understood, in marital happiness. And having glimpsed, their appetite, though too late in life to lead them to hope it would be satisfied, was whetted. They need not have been so pessimistic. It was soon to be sated.

  Lockhart, intrigued by what he had seen in the Racemes’ bedroom, had decided to acquaint himself more fully with the sexual peccadilloes of the human race and, while Jessica went joyfully off next day to her rendezvous with literary fame in Miss Genevieve Goldring’s garden hut, Lockhart took the train to London, spent several hours in Soho leafing through magazines and returned with a catalogue from a sex shop. It was full of the most alarming devices which buzzed, vibrated, bounced and ejaculated ad nauseam. Lockhart began to understand more fully the nature of sex and to recognize his own ignorance. He took the magazines and the catalogue up to the attic and hid them for future reference. The Wilsons next door were a more immediate target for his campaign of eviction and it had occurred to him that something more than the sound of a voice from beyond the grave might add urgency to their departure. He decided to include smell and taking a spade he dug up the putrefying body of Little Willie, dismembered it in the garage, and distributed its portions in the Wilsons’ coal cellar while they were out drowning their memories of the previous night at the local pub. The effect, on their return later and drunker that evening to a house that not only prophesied death but now stank of it more eloquently than words, was immediate. Mrs Wilson had hysterics and was sick and Mr Wilson, invoking the curse of the ouija board and table-knocking, threatened to fulfil the prophecy that there would soon be a death in the house by strangling her if she didn’t shut up. But the smell was too strong even for him and rather than spend another night in the house of death they drove to a motel.

  Even Jessica noticed the stench and mentioned it to Lockhart.

  ‘It’s the Wilsons’ drains,’ he said impromptu, and having said it promptly began to wonder if he couldn’t make use of the drains and the sewage system to introduce noxious matter into the houses of other unwanted tenants. It was worth thinking about. Meanwhile, he was having his work cut out comforting Jessica. Her experience of acting as amanuensis to the literary heroine of her youth, Miss Genevieve Goldring, had filled her with a terrible sense of disillusionment.

  ‘She’s just the most horrible person you ever met,’ she said, almost sobbing, ‘she’s cynical and nasty and all she thinks about is money. She didn’t even say “Good morning” or offer me a cup of tea. She just walks up and down dictating what she calls “The verbal shit my public likes to lick its chops over”. And I’m part of her public and you know I’d never …’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t, darling,’ said Lockhart soothingly.

  ‘I could have killed her when she said that,’ said Jessica, ‘I really could have. And she writes five books a year under different names.’

  ‘How do you mean, under different names?’

  ‘Well, she is not even called Genevieve Goldring. She’s Miss Magster and she drinks. After lunch she sat and drank crême de menthe and Daddy always said people who drank crême de menthe were common and he was right. And then the golf ball went wrong and she blamed me.’

  ‘Golf ball?’ said Lockhart. ‘What the hell was she doing with a golf ball?’

  ‘It’s a typewriter, a golf-ball typewriter,’ Jessica explained. ‘Instead of having separate letters on bars that hit the paper it has this golf ball with the alphabet on it that goes round and runs along the paper printing the letters. It’s ever so modern and it wasn’t my fault it went wrong.’

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ said Lockhart, intrigued by this mechanism, ‘but what’s the advantage of a golf ball?’

  ‘Well, you can just take the golf ball with the alphabet on it off and put on another one when you want a different typeface.’

  ‘You can? That’s interesting. So if you took the golf ball off her typewriter and brought it home you could put it on your own typewriter and it would look exactly the same, the stuff you wrote I mean?’

  ‘You couldn’t do it with an ordinary typewriter,’ said Jessica, ‘but if you had the same sort as hers nobody could tell the difference. Anyway she was just beastly and I hate her.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Lockhart, ‘you remember when you were working for those solicitors, Gibling and Gibling, and you told me about writing nasty things in books about people and libel and all that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jessica, ‘I just wish that horrid woman would write something nasty about us …’

  The gleam in Lockhart’s eye stopped her and she looked questioningly at him.

  ‘Oh, Lockhart!’ she said. ‘You are clever.’

  Next day Lockhart went to London once again and came back with a golf-ball typewriter of exactly the same make as Miss Genevieve Goldring’s. It had been a costly purchase but what he had in mind would make it cheap at the price. Miss Goldring, it appeared, never bothered to correct her proofs. Jessica had learnt that from Patsy. ‘Sometimes she has three books on the go at the same time,’ said the innocent Patsy. ‘She just dashes them off and forgets all about them.’

  An additional advantage was that Miss Goldring’s daily output remained in a drawer in the desk in the shed at the bottom of her garden and since she switched from crême de menthe to gin at six she was seldom sober by seven and almost always pooped by eight.

  ‘Darling,’ said Lockhart when Jessica came home with this news, ‘I don’t want you to go to work as a temporary typist any more. I want you to stay at home and wor
k at night.’

  ‘Yes, Lockhart,’ said Jessica obediently, and as darkness fell over the golf course, and East and West Pursley, Lockhart made his way to Green End and the shed at the bottom of the great authoress’s garden. He returned with the first three chapters of her latest novel, Song of the Heart, plus the golf ball from her typewriter. And late into the night Jessica sat and retyped the chapters. The heroine, previously called Sally, was now called Jessica and the hero, such as he was, was transformed from David to Lockhart. Finally, the name Flawse figured largely in the revised version which at three in the morning Lockhart placed in the drawer in the shed. There were other changes, too, and none of them to the advantage of Miss Goldring’s characters. Lockhart Flawse in the new version liked being tied to the bed and whipped by Jessica, and when not being whipped stole money from banks. All told, Song of the Heart had ingredients added that were extraordinarily libellous and were calculated to make a hole in Miss Goldring’s purse and a dirge in her heart. Since she wrote her novels at top speed, Lockhart was so busy fetching her daily output and replacing it by Jessica’s nightly amendments that his campaign for the eviction of the tenants in Sandicott Crescent had to be temporarily suspended. It was only when the novel was finished a fortnight later that Lockhart could relax and put Phase Two into operation. This involved a further outlay of money and was aimed simultaneously at the mental stability of the Misses Musgrove, and the physical ill-health of either, or both, depending on the degree of recrimination they indulged in, Mr and Mrs Raceme. But first he made further use of Jessica’s typewriter by purchasing a fresh golf ball with a different typeface and composing a letter to the manufacturers of those artefacts of sexual stimulation that had intrigued and disgusted him in the catalogue. The letter was addressed from 4 Sandicott Crescent, enclosed postal orders to the tune of eighty-nine pounds and was signed with a squiggle over the typed name of Mrs Musgrove. In it Mrs Musgrove ordered an ejaculatory and vibrating dildo of adjustable proportions, the bottom half of a plastic man complete with organs, and finally a studded rubber pad with battery attached which called itself a clitoral stimulator. Not to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar, Lockhart also subscribed to Lesbian Lusts, Women Only and Pussy Kiss, which three magazines he had been so appalled by that their effect on the Misses Musgrove month after month would be devastating. But having sent the letter he had to wait for the postal delay before observing any result.

  In the case of the Racemes results were more immediate. Lockhart’s methodical observations compiled in their dossier showed that Wednesday was the night the couple favoured for their horseplay and that it was usually Mr Raceme’s turn first. With that gallantry that his grandfather had observed in his ancestors, Lockhart decided that it would be ungentlemanly to strike a lady. He had also noted that Mrs Raceme was friendly with a Mrs Artoux who lived in a flat in the centre of East Pursley. Mrs Artoux was not in the phone book and therefore presumably had no phone. And so on Wednesday night Lockhart waited in the bird sanctuary with a stopwatch and gave Mrs Raceme ten minutes in which to attach her husband to the bed with the leather straps they seemed to favour before going to the phone box on the corner and dialling the Raceme number. Mrs Raceme took the call.

  ‘Can you come at once?’ said Lockhart through a handkerchief. ‘Mrs Artoux has had a stroke and is asking for you.’

  He emerged from the phone box in time to see the Racemes’ Saab shoot out of the drive, and consulted his stopwatch. Two minutes had elapsed since he had made the call and two minutes would not have given Mrs Raceme time to untie her husband. Lockhart sauntered down the street to their house, unlocked the door and went quietly inside. He turned out the light in the hall, climbed the stairs and stood in silence on the landing. Finally he peered into the bedroom. Naked, hooded, bound and gagged, Mr Raceme was in the grip of those obscure masochistic emotions which gave him so much peculiar satisfaction. He squirmed ecstatically on the bed. A second later he was still squirming but the ecstasy had gone. Used to the exquisite pain of Mrs Raceme’s light birch, the application of Lockhart’s patent horsewhip at maximum velocity to his rump produced a reflex that threatened to lift both his body off the bed and the bed off the floor. Mr Raceme spat the gag out of his mouth and tried to express his feelings vocally. Lockhart suppressed his yell by pushing his head into the pillow and applied his horsewhip to full advantage. By the time he had finished Mr Raceme had passed from masochism to sadism.

  ‘I’ll murder you, you fucking bitch,’ he screamed as Lockhart shut the bedroom door and went downstairs, ‘so help me God, I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do.’

  Lockhart let himself out of the front door and went round to the garden. From inside the house Mr Raceme’s screams and threats had begun to alternate with whimpers. Lockhart installed himself in the bushes and waited for Mrs Raceme to return. If half of the threats her husband was making were carried out he might well have to intervene once again to save her life. He debated the point but decided that whatever Mr Raceme might say, the state of his backside would deter him from putting anything into practice. He was on the point of leaving when the Saab’s headlights shone in the drive and Mrs Raceme let herself into the house.

  The ensuing sounds surpassed even those that had enlivened Sandicott Crescent on the evening of the Grabbles’ domestic tiff. Mrs Raceme’s statement, even before she entered the bedroom and saw Mr Raceme’s condition, that there was absolutely nothing the matter with Mrs Artoux and that she certainly hadn’t had a stroke was greeted by a scream of rage that shook the curtains and was followed by a second scream of almost equal proportions from Mrs Raceme. Lacking Lockhart’s clear understanding of what Mr Raceme had promised to do to her the moment he got free, she made the mistake of untying his legs. A second later, disproving Lockhart’s supposition that he wasn’t in any fit state to put theory into practice, Mr Raceme was on his feet and clearly raring to go. Unfortunately his hands were still lashed to the double bed and Mrs Raceme, recognizing almost instantaneously her mistake in untying his feet, refused to undo his hands.

  ‘What do you mean I did this to you?’ she shrieked as the double bed wedded to Mr Raceme’s feet blundered towards her. ‘I got this phone call from someone saying Mrs Artoux had had a stroke.’

  The word was too much for Mr Raceme. ‘Stroke?’ he yelled in a muffled sort of way through the pillow and the mattress that obstructed his view of things. ‘What in the name of hell do you mean by stroke?’

  In the garden Lockhart knew precisely. His patent horsewhip had needed no lead weights added to the leather thongs.

  ‘Well, all I’m telling you,’ shrieked Mrs Raceme, ‘is that if you think I did that to you, you’re out of your mind.’

  Mr Raceme was. Impeded by the bed and driven insane by the pain, he hurtled across the room in the general direction of her voice, smashed through the dressing-table behind which Mrs Raceme was sheltering, and carrying all before him, dressing-table, bed, bedside lamp and teamaker, not to mention Mrs Raceme, shot through the curtains of the patio window, smashed the double glazing and cascaded down into the flowerbed below. There his screams were combined with those of Mrs Raceme herself, lacerated in much the same part of her anatomy by the double glazing and a rose bush.

  Lockhart hesitated and crossed into the bird sanctuary, and as he moved silently towards Number 12 the sound of sirens could be heard above the shouts and yells of the Racemes. The Pettigrews had exercised their social conscience once again and phoned for the police.

  ‘What on earth was all that noise?’ Jessica enquired as he came in from the garage where he had deposited his horsewhip. ‘It sounded as if someone had fallen through a greenhouse roof.’

  ‘Most peculiar tenants we’ve got,’ said Lockhart, ‘they seem to kick up such a rumpus.’

  Certainly Mr and Mrs Raceme were kicking up a rumpus and the police found their predicament most peculiar. Mr Raceme’s lacerated posterior and his hood made instant identification difficult but it was t
he fact that he was still tied to the bed that intrigued them.

  ‘Tell me, sir,’ said the Sergeant who arrived and promptly phoned for an ambulance, ‘do you make a habit of wearing hoods when you go to bed?’

  ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ said Mr Raceme inadvisedly. ‘I don’t ask you what you do in the privacy of your home and you’ve got no right to ask me.’

  ‘Well, sir, if that’s the line you’re going to take, we’ll take the line that you’ve used obscene language to a police officer in the execution of his duty and have issued menaces against the person of your wife.’

  ‘And what about my person?’ yelled Mr Raceme. ‘You seem to have overlooked the fact that she thrashed me.’

  ‘We haven’t overlooked it, sir,’ said the Sergeant, ‘the lady seems to have made a good job of it.’

  The arrival of a constable who had been investigating the contents of the Racemes’ bedroom and was now carrying a bundle of rods, whips, canes and cat-o’-nine-tails merely confirmed the police in their suspicion that Mr Raceme had got what he asked for. Their sympathy was all for his wife and when Mr Raceme tried to renew his assault on her they dispensed with the need for handcuffs and carried him bed and all into the Black Maria. Mrs Raceme went away in an ambulance. The Sergeant, following in a police car, was frankly puzzled.

  ‘Something bloody odd going on down there,’ he said to the driver. ‘We’d better keep an eye on Sandicott Crescent from now on.’

  *

  From that night on a patrol car was stationed at the bottom of the Crescent and its presence there forced Lockhart to adopt new tactics. He had already given some thought to the use of the sewage system, and the police lent him the incentive. Two days later he purchased a wet-suit for underwater diving and an oxygen mask and, making use of the late Mr Sandicott’s detailed plans of the Crescent’s amenities, lifted the cover of the main sewer opposite his house, descended the ladder and closed it behind him. In the darkness he switched on his torch and made his way along, noting the inlets from each house as he went. It was a large main sewer and afforded him fresh insight into the habits of his neighbours. Opposite Colonel Finch-Potter’s subsidiary were deposited a number of white latex objects which didn’t accord with his supposedly bachelor status, while Mr O’Brain’s meanness was proven by his use of a telephone directory for toilet paper. Lockhart returned from his potholing determined to concentrate his attention on these two bachelors. There was the problem of the Colonel’s bull-terrier to be considered. It was an amiable beast but of as ferocious an aspect as that of its owner. Lockhart knew the Colonel’s habits already, though the discovery of so many contraceptives in the vicinity of his drain came as something of a surprise. There was more to the Colonel than met the eye. He would have to observe him more closely. Mr O’Brain presented less of a problem. Being Irish, he was a relatively easy target, and when Lockhart had divested himself of his wet-suit and had washed it, he resorted to the telephone yet again.