Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery. Francis Durbridge
back to the lift.
‘And he’s not coming back neither,’ the old boy added, ‘not never.’
‘Are you sure?’ She went into the lift; the clang of the gates and then the plunge to the ground seemed absurdly symbolic to her. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘No, miss. The head porter, he had a note from the agents this morning. We got the keys back, and there’s talk of another tenant moving in on Monday. There isn’t no mistake.’
‘But his clothes – the furniture – I mean, did he move out?’
The old man shrugged. ‘These flats are all let furnished. I suppose he just took his clothes and personal belongings.’ He watched her leave the lift and walk unhappily back to the street and his satisfaction waned. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ he said finally. ‘It came as a bit of a surprise to us as well. He’d been here three years. It was a bit sudden.’
‘Never mind,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve been stood up before.’ She tried to smile. ‘I suppose you’re working this weekend?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ He grinned. ‘But you’ll have a beautiful weekend.’
During the next three weeks Betty Stanway forgot Desmond Blane. She was a resilient girl and men still noticed her. The shoulder length auburn hair and the lithe dancer’s body attracted enough admiration to make the evenings fun. And then all the girls were going to appear on television, which meant extra rehearsals and a lot of hard work. They had been on television several times in the past five years, but Betty still experienced a naive feeling of excitement: maybe this would be her breakthrough, the girls featured on a regular show each week, eventual main billing, stardom. At one o’clock in the morning the fantasy would take hold, and it did no harm. She even began to feel fit, almost human, when she woke up. Until the morning when she saw a report in the newspaper about a robbery in Harkdale.
Then she remembered the telephone call which Desmond had been making that morning before he disappeared. He hadn’t even known where Harkdale was! Betty glanced at the date on the newspaper. It was the twenty-fourth, and the robbery had been on the twenty-third. She read through the report again. It just couldn’t be coincidence.
While she was dressing she turned on the radio. The rehearsal had been called for ten o’clock so she had no time to worry about ex-boyfriends. She put Harkdale out of her mind until the news came on.
‘Another of the men whom the police wished to question in relation to the bank robbery yesterday afternoon at Harkdale has died, it was reported early this morning. The man was forty-three-year-old Oscar Thorne –’
Betty went to work in a trance. She caught the tube at Belsize Park as usual, accepted a seat with a smile from an elderly business man, and sat staring at the black pipes in the tunnel. She wondered whether to go to the police, but she had nothing to tell them except a name, and that might seem like malice against the man who had jilted her. She lit a cigarette and read unseeingly through the rest of the newspaper. Protest demonstrations, war in Asia, a couple of sexual assaults, politicians denouncing racialism. Nothing to capture the attention. Her mind wandered on to an article about the new brains behind organised crime.
‘What Rothschild did to banking and Woolworth did to shopkeeping Al Capone did to crime, but Al Capone was not a brilliant man. Today the rewards of crime are comparable to those of other big business careers, and a brilliant tycoon might waver before deciding to become a property developer. And at least three tycoons have decided otherwise –’
Betty read with total absorption and almost forgot to change trains at Tottenham Court Road. She knew that Desmond wasn’t a tycoon of crime, because he had been protesting against the instructions he had received from someone. But she was pleased to have it confirmed that he was a business man. The article went on to question the effectiveness of a police force drawn from a basically underprivileged section of society, who could no more cope with modern crime than they could cope with irregularities in high finance.
The author was Paul Temple. In the last few lines of his article he mentioned the Harkdale robbery as proof of his argument. The series of articles had obviously been written well in advance, and the reference to Harkdale would have been a last minute insertion. Betty was impressed, especially when she arrived at the television studios and found that Paul Temple was to be a star guest in the Brian Clay Show that evening. She determined to tell him what had happened.
It would be easier to talk to a stranger than to someone she knew, even someone as close as Rita Fletcher. Rita came to the rehearsal for about an hour in the afternoon, and she sensed that something was wrong. But Betty couldn’t talk to her.
‘I’m depressed, I suppose,’ said Betty. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’
‘You girls are always down about something. Are these men worth it? I wish they didn’t exist!’ Rita was an extrovert woman in her mid-forties, and clearly men never gave her any trouble. She was bosomy and corsetted and her men did as she told them. ‘You need a rest. You ought to go home to mother for the weekend. On Monday you’ll be a new girl.’
‘It’s all right, Rita –’
‘Go home. Mr Coley won’t miss you for two days.’
Betty nodded gratefully. She hadn’t been home since Christmas. Maybe she could leave her problems behind in London. ‘I’ll telephone my mother during the break.’
She almost went home without talking to Paul Temple. He was a debonair type, smoothly relaxed with all the terrifying television people. As the evening wore on Betty’s resolution began to fail. She tried to speak to him twice, but he was always surrounded by producers and people like that. He had an amused manner which helped to make some politician Betty had never heard of look ridiculous. Even though Paul Temple smiled at her rather sweetly the things she had to say about Harkdale seemed too trivial, and she didn’t want to look a fool.
Then as she was leaving the studios she had seen him being driven away by a woman who didn’t look much older than herself. Betty had swung round in indecision and fallen across her suitcase. That was how she came to tell Paul Temple her troubles. [They gave her a lift to Oxford. She told her story over a succulent steak at the Coach House.]
‘Desmond seems to have completely disappeared,’ she concluded. ‘When I read about the robbery in Harkdale, and the man who was killed, the man they called Skibby, I realised what had happened.’
Paul Temple nodded in encouragement. ‘Tell me, Betty, did you ever meet any of Blane’s friends? Renson, or the man called Skibby, for instance?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’d never heard of them before that phone call.’
His wife, Steve, looked disappointed. ‘But surely you must have met some of his friends?’
‘I know it’s peculiar now that you mention it, but I didn’t. We went out quite a lot, but always it was only the two of us.’ She finished the steak, and felt contentedly full. The club itself impressed her. ‘Actually Rita came with us on one occasion. It was a Sunday and the three of us drove out to Maidenhead for lunch.’
‘When Desmond came to the club, to the Love-Inn, was he always alone?’ Steve asked.
‘Yes, always. Except on New Year’s Eve.’ Betty suddenly remembered the occasion, it was almost the first time she had met Desmond Blane. Most of the members had been drunk and Cynthia Elphinstone had nearly been sacked for doing a strip tease to Auld Lang Syne. ‘He had another man with him that night, a man called Arnold something or other. I didn’t like him very much. He stared at us girls.’
‘What did he look like?’ Paul Temple asked.
Betty closed her eyes in an effort to remember. She wasn’t very good at describing people. ‘He was about sixty, I suppose. Almost as tall as me, and he smiled the whole time. Perhaps he was just good natured. Oh yes, and he had a northern accent.’
When they dropped her off at the end of her road it was gone half past one and Betty