Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple. Francis Durbridge
was unbelievable. Investigating them had kept him pretty busy, but after a time their meanness and pettiness had begun to pall on him and he had become restless and discontented.
‘What you need,’ Bill Darkis, one of the Home Office pathologists Roy had met while working on a poisoning case, had told him, ‘is six months’ vegetating in the country. Why don’t you rent a cottage in Devon or Cornwall and write your war experiences? Do you good to get ’em out of your system. But don’t spend all your time indoors writing and smoking cigarettes. Get out and walk or dig. Do something with your hands instead of that thing of yours you call a brain.’
Roy had laughed and said he would think about it. He had done more. The summer before this he’d used his holiday trying to locate a suitable cottage. Again acting on Bill’s advice, he had bought a bicycle and gone riding along the south-west coast, or over the moors, just as the fancy had taken him.
He had been nearing the end of the fortnight’s trip when he had found himself in Shingleton, where he stayed the night. He had set out next morning for Torcombe along the cliff road. It had been a lovely day and he had dismounted to rest and enjoy a cigarette at the head of the combe, or valley, which led down to what he saw from his map was No Man’s Cove. Through the trees from where he had leaned against the wall that ran along the seaward side of the road he could see an inviting stretch of sand, and as there was no one in sight, he had decided to slip down for a quick bathe, leaving his cycle behind some bushes on the roadside.
Going down the combe, he had been surprised to come across the chalet, which had not been visible from the road because of the trees that flanked each side of a pretty little stream which ran down the bed of the valley to the sea. After his bathe he had gone to look at it more closely. A quick glance round showed that, apart from needing a coat of paint, a few new window-panes and some other minor repairs, the place seemed sound in wind and limb, so to speak. Indeed, it looked to be the very place he was seeking; remote, prettily situated, just the spot apparently if one didn’t want to be bothered by people. (It looks as if you’ve been bothered now all right, Roy reflected a little grimly.) In one of the windows there had been a faded, dirty notice:
TO LET – CHEAP
Appy Barwell & Co.
Caterers
Harbour Road, Shingleton
So back to Shingleton he had immediately gone to call on Barwell and Co. He vaguely remembered the name, and they had turned out to be the firm whose tea-shops and cafés he had seen dotted about the coast roads and villages like a rash, with their ‘Beautiful Barwell Teas’ signs. Ugh! Still, he’d been grateful for a cup more than once.
He recalled the breezy smart-Alec of a manager, who had told him that the chalet had been a great disappointment to them. If it hadn’t been for the war, of course … The manager had shrugged. They’d opened it in the summer of 1939, and at first hadn’t done too badly, considering all the war scares, but after that season it had been hopeless. Then the evacuation from the south-east had begun and for a time Shingleton Rural District Council had installed a couple of families from London there, but successive visitors had found that the loneliness and quiet of the place had got on their nerves more than the fear of the Luftwaffe’s bombs and they had drifted back to London. Since then the chalet had been empty. The evacuees had made rather a mess of the place, but if Mr Benton was interested they could soon have it cleaned up for him and made habitable.
Roy had told him he was interested, but he had not said why except that he had been ordered by his doctor to take a long rest following a serious illness. He had said he would like to look over the place and the manager had given him the key. As he had peered into the dirty interior of the chalet, Roy had reflected that the manager had been right in one respect at least – the evacuees had made rather a mess. But it wasn’t beyond reparation if the manager would be as good as his word.
Roy had found himself liking the place from the first. It was a one-storey building, square except for two bulging outhouses, the kitchen and the usual ‘offices’, which were a trifle primitive but would pass if one hadn’t too finicky a sense of smell. The doorway faced the sea, and a covered verandah ran round three sides of the square. That, presumably, had been so that teas could be served outside, but it had also struck Roy that it would be an admirable place for writing and for sleeping out on fine nights. The interior, apart from the kitchen and the ‘offices’, consisted of one big room, with a counter and shelves running the length of the left-hand wall as you entered. The counter, of course, would have to come out, but the shelves would be sure to come in handy. In the centre of the back wall was a large, rough, but serviceable brick fireplace, which, despite the filth that had accumulated in it, looked as if it could be made very inviting.
Not bad, Roy had mused, as he had stood in the centre of the big room looking around him. A few structural alterations, a good clean-up, some paint and distemper and lots of elbow grease, a few pieces of furniture – he was determined to live as simply as possible, though he would permit himself two luxuries in the shape of the divan, which would make an ideal bed, and the easy chair from his flat – and the place would be reasonably habitable.
It was, in fact, such a retreat as every Fleet Street journalist, with ambitions towards authorship, dreamed about – ‘far from the madding crowd’.
So he had cycled back to Shingleton once more, haggled with the manager a little over the rent, and as he didn’t want to move in until the following April, paid in advance so that in the meantime no one else would snap up the place. A year, he had thought, would be long enough to enable him to get the book written, but the English climate, even in the south-west, was not such as to make him want to start living the open-air life in the winter, at least to begin with. After he had got acclimatized it might not be so bad, and if he liked it he could stay on after he had finished the book. The rent and what it would cost him to live wouldn’t make too big a hole in his war gratuity, still untouched, and even if he didn’t succeed in selling the book he’d be able to hang on for a while at any rate. He had no intention of returning to Fleet Street without making a fight to avoid that fate.
Besides, as he intended to grow as much of his own food as possible – there was a plot of promising land by the side of the chalet – he might be able to make a little pin-money by selling his surplus to the shops in Shingleton and Torcombe. If he did not move in until the following spring, Barwell and Co. would have ample time to get the place renovated and cleaned up. He had arranged to let the manager know well in advance the exact date, and the manager had promised to get one of the village women to go in and light fires, air the place and lay in some food for him.
Roy had gone back to Fleet Street feeling very pleased with himself. He had not told anyone except Bill of his plans. The latter thoroughly approved of his arrangements, got quite enthusiastic about the chalet, and threatened to come and stay with him when he could get away from the ‘blasted corpses’ he had to dissect from time to time. ‘OK,’ Roy had said, ‘but don’t you come popping down every weekend; I’m going down there to work, not keep a hostel for pals who are too mean to pay for their holidays.’
Roy had found his crime routine during the winter wearisome and stale. He had been surprised to find how eagerly he was looking forward to going to No Man’s Cove and seeing what transformation – at least he hoped it would be a transformation – had been wrought in the chalet and to get to work on finishing it. It had been with a peculiar glow of satisfaction that he had gone to see Jim Tailby, his news editor, and told him he was resigning.
Jim had been thunderstruck. Roy had thought that he regarded him a little oddly as he said: ‘Look here, old man, are you sure you’re all right? If you’re not feeling up to the mark – and I shouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t after all you went through during the war – take a couple of months sick leave, but don’t chuck up your job altogether. We should find it damned difficult to replace you; no-one else has got your contacts. If it’s money—’
‘No, Jim, it isn’t money and I’m perfectly well,’ Roy had told him. ‘It’s just that