To Die but Once (Maisie Dobbs #14)(57)
“You’ll be in uniform soon, anyway,” said Maisie.
“Counting down the hours, Miss Dobbs. Counting down the hours.”
Maisie laughed. “Charlotte, I’ve another question. As I was leaving the other day, a motor car came into the yard—it was a black and green Rover Ten. Do you know who it belongs to?”
There was a brief pause before Bright answered. “I shouldn’t say, you know, what with that form I had to sign, the one about keeping quiet about what I do here—but seeing as this is my last day, I don’t give tuppence ha’apenny for Yates and his secrets. That motor car belongs to a bloke called Jimmy Robertson, but that wasn’t him driving it. No, that was one of his tea boys—that’s what my dad calls them, the blokes down the ladder from the top. Robertson has a finger in a lot of pies, and he comes here because one of the pies he has a finger in is the painting business. He supplies that special paint and helped get Mike Yates that contract. I’m not supposed to know that, but I do—oh, hang on.” There was a pause, then Bright came back on the line. “No, madam, I’m afraid it wasn’t Yates Painting and Decorating—I’ve looked up the records. However, Yates would be more than happy to give you an estimate—shall I get Mr. Yates to telephone you? No? All right. Thank you, madam.”
“Charlotte—could you give me your address quickly, just in case I have any more questions for you.”
The young woman recited her address in a low voice, adding a hurried good-bye.
Maisie left the telephone kiosk and sat in her motor car, staring straight ahead, deep in thought, paying no attention to her surroundings. She sighed, shook her head and spoke aloud, as if someone else were in the Alvis, and she had asked for their opinion. “Jimmy Robertson. That’s all I need—Jimmy Robertson.”
Maisie had never met Jimmy Robertson, though she had heard of him. Had not everyone in south London heard of the Robertson family? In the office, where she kept the card file started by Maurice, a resource used throughout her apprenticeship and which she continued to refer to, there was a clutch of cards, each one bearing a Christian name followed by the surname “Robertson.” The family’s tentacles reached into almost every business south of the river, and—she had heard—possibly even into Westminster. No wonder Sergeant Bright worried about his daughter—it beggared belief that he had ever allowed her to work for Mike Yates, if that was the company he kept. Jimmy Robertson was known to be ruthless with those who crossed him. She remembered hearing about one of Robertson’s “tea boys”—a man who had, on the orders of Jimmy Robertson, been dismembered before his body was set in concrete and thrown into the Thames. It was Caldwell who had told her. “The word on the street is that Barney Coleman’s now holding up Rotherhithe Docks. And they say Jimmy Robertson started cutting him before he was dead!” Robertson was not someone to be underestimated—Barney Coleman was his cousin.
She had intended to place a call to Chelstone to ask after Anna’s health, but looked at the single penny left in her purse—she would have to do it later. Instead she started the engine and slipped the motor car into gear, her thoughts on the conversation with Charlotte Bright. An unexpected thread was now running through the web. It happened—though not often. But this time perhaps that single thread might be the one to pull. As she made her way to RAF Templeton, checking the map at every junction, she wondered what counsel Maurice might offer. She remembered a story he had told about a sojourn in Morocco as a young man. He explained that in times past, for the early morning and evening Muslim call to prayer, the muezzin had no means of telling the correct time—the exact moments of dawn and dusk—so from their balcony high up on the minaret, they would hold two threads in the palm of one hand: a black thread and a white thread. When they could see no distinction between white and black at night, that was the time to begin their call. And in the morning, as soon as they could distinguish the white thread, so they would summon the faithful to prayer. Maurice had taken a pencil and paper and drawn a minaret, so that she might know what this tower, part of the mosque, looked like. She knew, then, as she turned off onto another lane, that for all her work on a case map and despite the colors used to follow each thread of evidence collected, she was still at the dawn of her investigation, for she could not distinguish black from white. Indeed, as she followed directions to the airfield, she was reminded of the difficulty of the task—all road signs had been removed. It seemed to be a reflection of her investigation into the death of Joe Coombes.
Once again Maisie had to go through the procedure of identifying herself to a guard, for someone at an office in a low building on the airfield to approve her presence, and only then would she be authorized to wait for the person she wanted to see. As she stood alongside the Alvis, she saw a van coming toward the guardhouse, a cloud of dust rising up behind the back wheels.
“I’m going to give that lad a bit of a talking to about his driving,” said the guard. “He looks as if he’s in a race to get over here. Pity he’s in civvy street and not one of ours—I’d have him on latrine duty for that.”
The van screeched to a halt on the other side of the barrier, and Freddie Mayes stepped out, slamming the door behind him.
“Before you leave your old jam-jar in the way, mate, you’d better put it over to one side—there’s people driving up and they want to get in and out,” the guard admonished the painter, who—thought Maisie—if looks could kill, had just committed murder.