Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple. Francis Durbridge
recall the exact sequence of events, but it worked out something like this – first a flash of orange light with fiery red in its centre, which completely blinded him for a moment or two; then a cracking explosion, a whistle in the air over his bent head, and finally a faint clattering noise.
Instinctively, from his stooping position, he dropped flat on his face on the verandah. He remembered thinking as he fell, and feeling rather pleased about it, that he hadn’t forgotten his Service training. When, in the next few moments, as he lay there nothing else happened, he began slowly to worm his way on his stomach into the chalet, where he could hear Angus scuffling excitedly to and fro.
In the darkness he felt for the table in the middle of the room and cautiously raised himself. He reached up and his groping hand found the matches near the lamp where he always kept them. He waited a few moments, listening, then struck a match. A quick glance told him that the room was empty. He sighed with relief, got to his feet, lit the lamp and quickly closed the door.
Then he looked around, and on the mantelpiece, facing the door, he saw what he had expected to find. Lying on its side was a still-smoking pistol. It had been the central part of a neatly made booby trap, the sort of thing he had often come across during the war, arranged so that the pistol would fire immediately anyone opened the door.
He thought: If I hadn’t stooped to smack Angus I’d be a dead man now. Suddenly he felt clammily cold. He poured himself a stiff whisky and drank it. That made him feel better. You must have gone soft, he told himself. You never felt like this during the war. But that had been different. You expected this sort of thing then. Your life hung by a thread which might snap at any moment. But you didn’t expect to find booby traps in a little chalet tucked away in a quiet spot like No Man’s Cove.
He examined the pistol again. It was a German Luger and the trap had been very neatly arranged. The Germans were experts at booby traps, and Leyland had ‘guessed’ that Delouris and his other escaped friends were within five miles of the old mine. This looked like something more than a guess, but if Delouris and his crowd were responsible for this, how had they got on to him so soon, and why?
Angus was still sniffing all round the chalet, especially near the side window. Roy went over to it. One of the panes of glass near the catch had been neatly removed. So that was how they’d got in, if it was ‘they’. Quite simple, of course.
He stood holding the pistol in his hand, pondering his best line of action. His first impulse was to go back to the mine and tell Leyland what had happened, but, he reflected, he might still be under observation by the person or persons who had set the trap to see if it had claimed its victim. He decided that news of the incident could wait until morning when he went into Torcombe. He could leave a message for Leyland at the police station.
Roy turned down the lamp, walked to the door and looked cautiously out. It was a beautiful night. The air was soft and still warm. He could hear the sea murmuring quietly along the beach. On any other night he would have gone for a bathe before he went to bed, but the idea did not tempt him tonight. Orion was flashing jewelled messages in the sky and the perfume of the night-scented stocks he had planted near the stream was pleasant in his nostrils. This was a night for romance, if ever there was one, not for shootings and what-have-you, but all he’d got was something akin to a slap in the face. He sighed a little, turned and went inside.
He didn’t sleep on the verandah that night. Instead he locked the door of the chalet, saw that all the windows were securely fastened, took out his old Service revolver from his pack and saw that it was loaded. Then he lay down, but without taking off his clothes.
It was a long time before he got to sleep, though the night was calm and peaceful, except for Angus’s sighings and snorings. When he did get off, he dreamed an absurd boy’s adventure sort of dream in which he chased film gangsters all over England, and rescued Miss Silvers from their clutches in all kinds of extraordinary situations. But every time he tried to claim his due reward, she held him off with a pistol – a Luger pistol.
Torcombe was almost unique in being a Cornish village which did not figure in the handsomely illustrated Holiday Haunts annuals with which the railway companies seek to beguile the jaded city-dweller with vistas of golden beaches and laughing bathing beauties perched nonchalantly on razor-edged rocks, which must have been extremely uncomfortably even to the photographers’ models who specialized in the type of work.
True, there was a year before the war when it did achieve a bare mention as a ‘quaint village with good fishing’, but not even the word ‘quaint’ was enough to cause a notable increase in Torcombe’s population that summer, and as only one of the residents, old Mrs Tregarthy, who everyone thought was a little touched anyway, took advantage of the opportunity to advertise board and lodgings, h. and c., one minute from sea, Torcombe was thereafter left to linger in obscurity, so far as the railway companies were concerned.
The railway guide was correct, however, in saying that Torcombe had good fishing. It had, and it smelt like it, which was probably why the occasional wandering visitors who did find their way there in summer took a look, a sniff and then departed for other points of the compass. That was all right by Torcombe; the inhabitants just went on with their business of fishing.
There were a few regular enthusiasts who came every year to enjoy the excellent offshore fishing, which provided good sport. They generally stayed at the pub on the quayside, the ‘Harbour Bar’, and ‘stayed’ was often the correct word so far as the bar part of it was concerned, for Tim Austell’s home-brewed ale was something quite unique to those who, for the fifty or so other weeks of the year, knew only the suburban roadhouse concoctions.
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