Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple

He paused to help Angus extricate himself from a rabbit hole and they went on towards the chalet. They had all been glad to see him back in the Daily Tribune office, and having had his fill of physical excitement for the time being, he had returned quite happily to his old job, though it had taken him some time to pick up the threads again. There were several new faces in the office and in the police force with whom he had to deal, and the number of new rackets that had sprung up in the wake of rationing and other controls 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 I feel I’ve got to get away. It’s that book I told you about. If I don’t get it out of my system now, I never shall.’

‘Well, I suppose you know your own business best,’ Jim had replied ruefully, ‘but I take a damned poor view of it. I’ll bet you’re back here inside a month asking if your job’s been filled.’ He shook his head somewhat ruefully, then smiled. ‘Well, if it has I’ll fire the bloke who’s got it. You know that as far as I’m concerned you can come back any time.’

‘Thanks, Jim,’ Roy had said. ‘That’s very handsome of you and I won’t forget it, but I doubt if I’ll be back. I’m going to finish with crime reporting once and for all. After that – well, you know as much as I do. Maybe I’ll wander round the world a bit – if I’ve anything left to wander with.’

‘Anyone you mean,’ Jim had countered with a laugh.

‘No, not anyone,’ Roy had replied, ‘and you ought to know me better than to think there’s a woman behind all this, so don’t get any romantic ideas into your head. I love the ladies, when I’ve time for ’em and nothing better to do, but not enough to get myself entangled with one of ’em. Confirmed bachelor and man’s man, that’s me.’

‘Your sort always fall the hardest,’ Jim had said. ‘I’ve seen it happen to more than one. And mark my words: one of these days you’ll fall good and proper. You’ll pick up some nice girl somewhere and you’ll find you can’t put her down.’

‘To hear you talk, anyone would think I was going on the halls with an acrobatic act,’ grinned Roy.

‘There are worse ways of making a living,’ grunted Jim, dismissing him with a significant nod, as both his telephones rang simultaneously.

CHAPTER III (#ulink_3a943204-e54e-53e8-8c95-e1988a630b74)

A Man’s Life (#ulink_3a943204-e54e-53e8-8c95-e1988a630b74)

Was he as woman-proof as he had boasted? Roy asked himself as he went into the chalet and set about getting breakfast. Fine man’s man you are now, he reflected, getting all excited about seeing a woman’s footprint in the sand. Ah well. He flipped Angus a couple of biscuits from the table’s edge – he seemed to prefer them served that way – and as he ate he looked around the chalet. A trifle bare, he thought, but pretty comfortable on the whole and a darned sight better than some of the dumps you were in during the war. And you’re on your own, with no one to please except yourself. Then he suddenly realized that he was not alone, that visitors had passed within a stone’s-throw of his door not so long ago. He found the thought somewhat disturbing.

He’d had to pig it a bit the first week or so while he was moving in and getting the place to rights, and had felt that the whitewashing, the distempering and the painting, which he had done himself, would never be finished, especially the cleaning up afterwards. At first he had been too tired at night to do much writing, but gradually existence here, as in Fleet Street, had settled into a more or less regular routine, with this difference – it was a routine of his own choosing. No one told him what to do or where to go. He got up when he liked, ate when he liked, worked at the book when he felt like it, or in the garden he had made; slept, walked, swam, sunbathed, or just loafed around as the fancy took him. He observed only one general rule – when it was fine he stayed outdoors as much as possible, saving the indoor jobs for when it was cool or wet.

After the hurly-burly of Fleet Street it seemed an ideal existence, so much so that he was thinking of staying here indefinitely. If he could make enough money out of his writing to live, not luxuriously, but simply as he was doing now … That was the snag, but he had high hopes of the book, which was going well, and maybe the Tribune would serialize it before it was published – if it ever was. He had also had one or two promising ideas for other books.

‘I could think of a hell of a sight worse existence than this, couldn’t you, Angus?’ he asked the dog. Angus amiably chuntered agreement in the way Cairns do, for all the world as if they were talking. Angus, in fact, was having the time of his life. All through the war he had stayed with Roy’s sister in Cheshire, seeing his master only when he came on leave and then not for long. He did not know what had led to his being brought to this seventh heaven, but he was all for staying here as long as possible.

Roy had found him an ideal companion, for the dog had kept him from feeling too lonely. The thing he had missed most had been the sound of other human voices – he had thought that would be the cacophony he would be most glad to get away from – and he had slipped into the habit of talking aloud both to himself and to the dog. When he thought he was doing too much of it – he’d heard it was one of the first signs of madness! – he got on his cycle and, with Angus running alongside him and barking madly, sped off along the cliff road towards Torcombe to spend the evening in the smoke-room of the Cliff Top Inn playing darts, draughts or dominoes and drinking ale with the fishermen, with whom he sometimes went out in their boats.

He knew that they thought him a bit of an odd bird, but gradually they had come to accept him, and he found himself looking forward to their company. Ruddy-faced Tod Murdock, the landlord, a retired deep-sea fisherman, his wife and daughter Modwen, always made him feel at home there. For the rest, when it was fine (and he had been very lucky in the weather that summer, the villagers told him) he worked in the garden he had made alongside the chalet. The soil, previously uncultivated, was rich. He had grown some fine peas and beans – Tod told him he ought to have entered some in the Torcombe Allotment Association’s show, and had bought most of his surplus – and the other vegetables were looking fine. He had also planted various flowers in nooks and crannies along the banks of his little stream, from which he got his water, which flowed clear and cold past the chalet. It looked a picture now.

When it was too hot for gardening, he sunbathed or swam in the deep blue water of the little cove. At first he had worn bathing trunks, but as the days went by and he did not see anyone near the cove, he discarded them, and most of the time he went about naked, feeling a freedom of body movement that he had never known before. He had been fit enough when he was in the Service, but two years of Fleet Street life, irregular hours and too many cigarettes had taken the edge off that. Now, however, there was again no trace of flabbiness on any part of his six foot, well-knit frame and his skin was a rich golden brown.

He had found that outdoor work had caused the rhythm of his life to slow down – he had soon discovered that gardening can’t be rushed – except when the fury of creative writing caught him in its grip, sometimes for hours at a stretch, so that he neither ate, drank nor slept, but worked on in the soft light of his oil lamp until either inspiration failed him, or his back and fingers ached so much that he could no longer sit at the typewriter at the desk he had rigged up on the verandah. After a long spell such as this he was more physically tired than any amount of digging or sawing up logs in readiness for the winter could make him. After such a phase, he would fling himself down on the divan on the verandah and sleep the sleep of exhaustion until the early morning sun on his face woke him.

As he cleared away after breakfast, Roy’s mind switched from considering his mode of existence to the effect the discovery of the footprints had had on him. He was vaguely disturbed to find that it had aroused once more all the sense of curiosity which had made him one of Fleet Street’s crack crime reporters. He had imagined he had lost that during the months of his Crusoe-like existence in the Cove, but perhaps it was true as they said, ‘Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman’. Already he was beginning to sense a story in those footprints.

‘Blast, blast, blast!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘Why the hell did this have to happen just when things were going so well?’

Angus looked up inquiringly, and then followed him out to the pool Roy had made in the stream and watched him wash the breakfast things. When they were clean Roy stood up and looked around him. In the pale morning sunlight the cove looked its loveliest. It was going to be another hot day, just right for sunbathing followed by a good long swim.

‘Well, go ahead and swim,’ Roy told himself again aloud. ‘Forget you ever saw the footprints. You don’t have to try to find out where they go. There’s no news editor badgering you now. Try minding your own business for once. Don’t get tangled up in anything that may spoil all this and take your mind off the book. That’s what you’ve come here to write – not hectic news stories about glamorous women smugglers. You’re not a crime reporter any more. You’re really enjoying yourself and living your own life at last. Why spoil it?’

He turned to walk back to the chalet, and as he went the crime reporter answered him. ‘It won’t do any harm to find out where the footprints go,’ this voice insisted insidiously. ‘Besides, you may not be able to find out. You’re no Boy Scout and you can’t go and ask the Yard about it. Those prints have rather spoiled your beautiful dream, haven’t they? You know you’ll never rest now until you get to the bottom of it all, so you might as well get on with the job.’ He could almost hear Jim Tailby’s voice echo – ‘And mind it’s a good story!’

The crockery in his hands had dried in the sunshine by the time he got back to the chalet. Mechanically, his mind still on other things, Roy replaced it on the shelves. Then he put on a sports shirt and a pair of old flannels just in case he met anyone. He went outside again, closing the door behind him and locking it. Angus ran ahead, knowing he was going for a walk. Roy had gone a few yards towards the beach when he realized that this was the first time he had locked the door of the chalet since he had got out of the habit after the first week he had been there.

‘Idiot,’ he muttered to himself. But he didn’t go back.

CHAPTER IV (#ulink_30bd5c80-68e3-59f6-9295-dd41c990843a)

Rude Awakening (#ulink_30bd5c80-68e3-59f6-9295-dd41c990843a)

The man on the camp bed groaned, stirred, opened his eyes and found himself looking at a pair of trim, silk-stocking-clad ankles. He blinked and tried to raise his head. Pain leaped like a striking beast, clawing at the back of his head and neck. A little moan escaped him and he lowered his head and closed his eyes once more. The pain seemed to take an age to subside.

When it did he opened his eyes again. The ankles were still there. The man realized at last that he was lying on his right side. He could feel a bandage round his head. He tried, more cautiously this time, to raise himself on his elbow, but at once the pain returned and forced another groan from him. As from a long way off, he heard a woman’s voice.

‘Ah,’ it said softly, ‘I think the inquisitive Major Benton is coming to himself again.’