The Collected Works. Josephine Tey
weeks, together, Harry did not stir away from his temporary home. As soon as he made a little extra money, he sat back and drank it.
Well, if one is going to interview a china-mender one’s first necessity is broken china. Erica drove into Tunbridge Wells, hoping that the great-aunt who lived sombrely in Calverly Park was sleeping off her forbidden pastry and not promenading under the lime trees, and in an antique shop spent some of Kindness’s coffin money on a frivolous little porcelain figure of a dancer. She drove back to Pembury and in the afternoon quiet of a deep lane proceeded to drop the dancer with abandon on the running-board of the car. But the dancer was tough. Even when Erica took her firmly by the feet and tapped her on the jamb of the door, she remained whole. In the end, afraid that greater violence might shatter her completely, she snapped off an arm with her finger and thumb, and there was her passport to Harrogate Harry.
You cannot ask questions about a vague tramp who, you think, may have stolen a coat. But to look for a china-mender is quite a legitimate search, involving no surprise or suspicion in the minds of the questioned. It took Erica only ninety minutes to come face to face with Harrogate. It would have taken her less, but the tent was a long way from any made road; first up a cart track through woods, a track impassable even for the versatile Tinny, then across an open piece of gorse land with far views of the Medway valley, and into a second wood to a clearing at its further edge, where a stream ran down to a dark pool.
Erica wished that the tent had not been in a wood. From her earliest childhood she had been fearless by nature (the kind of child of whom older people say out hunting: Not a nerve in her body), but there was no denying that she didn’t like woods. She liked to see a long way away. And though the stream ran bright and clear and merry in the sunlight, the pool in the hollow was still and deep and forbidding. One of those sudden, secret cups of black water more common in Sussex than in Kent.
As she came across the clearing carrying the little dancer in her hand, a dog rushed out at her, shattering the quiet with hysterical protest. And at the noise a woman came to the tent door and stood there watching Erica as she came. She was a very tall woman, broadshouldered and straight, and Erica had the mad feeling that this long approach to her over an open floor should end in a curtsey.
“Good afternoon,” she called, cheerfully, above the clamour of the dog. But the woman waited without moving. “I have a piece of china—Can’t you make that dog be quiet?” She was face to face with her now, only the noise of the dog between them.
The woman lifted a foot to the animal’s ribs, and the high yelling died into silence. The murmur of the stream came back.
Erica showed the broken porcelain figure.
“Harry!” called the woman, her black inquisitive eyes not leaving Erica. And Harry came to the tent door: a small weaselish man with bloodshot eyes, and evidently in the worst of tempers. “A job for you.”
“I’m not working,” said Harry, and spat.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I heard you were very good at mending things.”
The woman took the figure and broken piece from Erica’s hands. “He’s working, all right,” she said.
Harry spat again, and took the pieces. “Have you the money to pay?” he asked, angrily.
“How much will it be?”
“Two shillings.”
“Two and six,” said the woman.
“Oh, yes, I have that much.”
He went back into the tent, and the woman stood in the way, so that Erica could neither follow nor see. Unconsciously she had, in imagining this moment, always placed herself inside the tent—with the coat folded up in the corner. Now she was not even to be allowed to see inside.
“He won’t be long,” Queenie said. “By the time you’ve cut a whistle from the ash tree, it’ll be ready.”
Erica’s small sober face broke into one of its rare smiles. “You thought I couldn’t do that, didn’t you?” For the woman’s phrase had been a flick in the face of a supposed town-dweller.
She cut the wood with her pocket-knife, shaped it, nicked it, and damped it in the stream, hoping that a preoccupation might disarm Queenie and her partner. She even hoped that the last processes of whistle-manufacture might be made in friendly company with the mending of china. But the moment she moved back to the tent, Queenie came from her desultory stick-gathering in the wood to stand guard. And Erica found her whistle finished and the mended figure in her hands, without being one whit wiser or richer than she was when she left the car in the road. She could have cried.
She produced her small purse (Erica hated a bag) and paid her half-crown, and the sight of the folded notes in the little back partition all waiting to do their work of rescue, drove her to desperation. Without any warning and without knowing she was going to say it, she asked the man:
“What did you do with the coat you took at Dymchurch?”
There was a moment of complete stillness, and Erica rushed on:
“I don’t want to do anything about it. Prosecuting, or anything like that, I mean. But I do want that coat awfully bad. I’ll buy it back from you if you still have it. Or if you’ve pawned it—”
“You’re a nice one!” the man burst out. “Coming here to have a job of work done and then accusing a man of battle and blue murder. You be out of here before I lose my temper good and proper and crack you one on the side of the jaw. Impudent little——with your loose tongue. I’ve a good mind to twist it out of your bloody head, and what’s more I—”
The woman pushed him aside and stood over Erica, tall and intimidating.
“What makes you think my man took a coat?”
“The coat he had when Jake, the lorry-driver, gave him a lift a week last Tuesday was taken from a car at Dymchurch. We know that.” She hoped the “we” sounded well. And she hoped she didn’t sound as doubtful as she felt. They were both very innocent and indignant-looking. “But it isn’t a matter of making a case. We only want the coat back. I’ll give you a pound for it,” she added, as they were about to break in on her again.
She saw their eyes change. And in spite of her predicament a great relief flooded her. The man was the man. They knew what coat she was talking about.
“And if you’ve pawned it, I’ll give you ten shillings to tell me where.”
“What do you get out of this?” the woman said. “What do you want with a man’s coat?”
“I didn’t say anything about it being a man’s.” Triumph ran through her like an electric shock.
“Oh, never mind!” Queenie dismissed with rough impatience any further pretence. “What is it to you?”
If she mentioned murder they would both panic, and deny with their last breath any knowledge of the coat. She knew well, thanks to her father’s monologues, the petty offender’s horror of major crime. They would go to almost any lengths to avoid being mixed up, even remotely, in a capital charge.
“It’s to get Hart out of trouble,” she said. “He shouldn’t have left the car unattended. The owner is coming back tomorrow, and if the coat isn’t found by then Hart will lose his job.”
“Who’s Art?” asked the woman. “Your brother?”
“No. Our chauffeur.”
“Chauffeur!” Harry gave a high skirl of laughter that had little amusement in it. “That’s a good one. I suppose you have two Rolls Royces and five Bentleys.” His little red eyes ran over her worn and outgrown clothes.
“No. Just a Lanchester and my old Morris.” As their disbelief penetrated: “My name is Erica Burgoyne. My father is Chief Constable.”
“Ye’? My name is John D. Rockfeller, and my father was the Duke of Wellington.”
Erica