Chapter 17 The Lamb and Flag
The Lamb and Flag
“Where’ve you been?” Veronica said. “I was worried about you.”
“You don’t look very worried.”
Veronica had made herself a sausage sandwich and was reading a battered copy of The Seven Dials Mystery. “The old ladies downstairs lent it to me.” She held the book up. “Agatha Christie. Never heard of her. Have you?”
“I have.”
“She’s quite good.”
“I’m sure she’d be flattered to hear your opinion.”
Veronica finished her sandwich and licked her fingers. “Where have you been, anyway?”
“Oh, you know—the office.”
“I’d like to see this office. Sounds like an interesting place.”
—
“So this Archie person is trying to make a patsy of you?” Veronica said, crunching noisily on a piece of the cinder toffee he had bought for her on the way home (with money he had been forced to borrow off her).
A grateful Mrs. Betty was chomping—almost as noisily—on a bone that Flynn had begged for her off a butcher.
She was a good deal more portly these days, he noticed.
“A patsy? Yes, I think so.”
He hadn’t intended to tell Veronica his woes, yet it seemed ironic that of all people she seemed the most trustworthy person to roll out his own sorry tale to. She had no respect for authority, so it seemed unlikely that she’d run off to the police, and she certainly appreciated a good story.
“And this Delphy person was—”
“Delphine,” he corrected. “And let’s keep her in the present tense for now.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.”
“Was she this Archie’s floozy? His doxy? His bit of fluff? Started making demands on him? Wanted him to leave his wife?” (What was in those books she read?) “And was the floozy blackmailing him with mucky pics of his wife?”
“Put succinctly.”
“Big word. Don’t know what it means.”
“In a nutshell.”
“Uncle Gerry keeps his mucky pics in the tool shed.”
“Are they of women?” he felt obliged to check.
“Yeah, women—what else would you have mucky pics of?”
Flynn wasn’t about to reveal to her the vast amount of human frailty and corruption that could be fitted into a Manila envelope. The more he heard about Uncle Gerry, the less suitable a father figure he seemed to be. Even less suitable, if that were possible, than Flynn himself.
“Floozies do a lot of blackmailing,” Veronica said, nodding sagely. “And now the floozy’s—”
“Delphine.”
“She’s disappeared and you think this Archie might have killed her, but the police think it was you that might have knocked her off.” She looked thoughtful. “What about his wife?”
“Mitzi? What about her?”
“Maybe she topped the floozy in a jealous rage. Women do kill people—they do it all the time in books.”
Flynn’s instinct was to deny the possibility, but when he thought of Mitzi he could imagine her large hands wielding a blade or squeezing a neck only too well. Knew a woman once who killed a man with the heel of her shoe, Tapper had said.
“And what about this barman who saw you fighting with the floozy outside the Dog and Bone?” (Mrs. Betty’s ears pricked up.)
“The Lamb and Flag. He lied. I didn’t fight with her. Delphine, call her by her name.”
“Why don’t you ask the barman why he lied?
” Veronica stood up abruptly, scattering crumbs of cinder toffee all over the floor.
Mrs. Betty hurried to clean up like an efficient char with a carpet sweeper.
“We can be at the Lamb and Whatsit before closing time if you get your skates on. Come on, Dad.”
Dad? Flynn was surprised at the effect of that one-syllable word on his heart. A punch rather than a caress. For all he knew, its use was ironic on her part, but he gave himself the benefit of the doubt.
How did Veronica even know the opening hours of public houses?
Flynn had never given much thought to what it would be like to be a parent, as he had never really expected to be one.
At best, he supposed he had imagined patiently dribbling a ball around a garden with an apple-cheeked little boy or teaching the same boy how to hold a cricket bat.
As the boy grew, Flynn would initiate him into the mysteries of Wisden and the internal combustion engine.
As for a daughter, he hadn’t been able to conjure up much beyond a little lisping thing who sat on his knee and gazed up at him in adoration.
He had certainly never imagined the feral creature that was Veronica Shears.
—
“The game is afoot!” she said, her eyes shining as they approached the Lamb and Flag. Flynn was surprised. She had read Sherlock Holmes, not just the other literary dross she was so fond of?
“Sherlock who? No, it’s just something Uncle Gerry says.”
Mrs. Betty waddled into the pub, bringing up the rear. She had insisted on bringing her bone, carrying it awkwardly but proudly in her mouth.
“Mine’s half a shandy, please,” Veronica said, hopping on to a bar stool and grinning like a cannibal at the barman.
“How old are you, young lady?”
“Eighteen,” Veronica said promptly.
“And I’m the Queen of Sheba. I’m not serving you, miss. You’ve got yourself a handful there, squire,” he said to Flynn. “I bet she keeps you on your toes. Worth it though, I imagine,” he added with a leer.
“She’s my daughter,” an appalled Flynn said.
“They all say that, squire.”
He rang the bell and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Time, gentlemen, please!” even though there was only one other customer sitting quietly in the corner.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, the man drained his pint obediently and shuffled out of the door.
“See you tomorrow, Tommy,” he said. The barman acknowledged the valediction with a snort.
“That your name, then?” Veronica said. “Tommy?”
“Gammage, Tommy Gammage. What’s it to you?”
“Are you in charge here?”
“Landlord’s laid up in hospital. I’m running this place for the brewery. I have to live above the shop and get paid a pittance. If I could get something else I would, trust me. Anyway, you can both bugger off. I’m closing up. Last orders were ten minutes ago.”
“We’re not here to drink.”
“Then what are you doing in a pub?”
Veronica produced a little notebook from Ivy’s handbag, as well as a pencil, the end of which looked as though it had been gnawed by a rat.
You had to admire her. She was so used to getting her own way that it never struck her that one day she wouldn’t.
Painstakingly, she wrote Tommy Gammage. Her spelling was even worse than her handwriting.
“Do you recognize me?” Flynn said to the barman.
“Never seen you before in my life.”
“Let me jog your memory. You told the police that you saw me fighting with a woman outside the Lamb and Flag last week. Someone paid you to lie to them.”
“What can I say? A man’s got to eat, hasn’t he?”
“Not at another man’s expense, he doesn’t.”
Gammage shrugged. “Everyone has a price.”
“Who paid you?”
“Can’t remember.”
“Try.”
“How much money were you paid, Mr. Gammage?” Veronica asked. “Because, I tell you what—we’ll double it if you spill the beans and tell us who paid you it.” She took the little drawstring purse from Ivy’s old handbag and dangled it in front of Gammage like a lure to a recalcitrant hawk.
“Gave me five quid, then,” he said, his eyes glued hungrily to the little purse.
“Try again,” Veronica scoffed. Was this how she negotiated with Uncle Gerry? Flynn wondered. She dangled the purse again. “There’s two pounds in here for you, if you tell us who it was.” Flynn doubted that. Veronica’s little drawstring purse was beginning to look as flat as a dead mouse.
Eventually, after many protestations and having been talked half to death by Ivy Shears’s relentless daughter, Gammage bottomed out at one pound. That was all it cost to hang a man for murder, Flynn thought despondently. You probably couldn’t even buy the hoof of a cow for that.
“Mind you,” Gammage procrastinated, “if you put another ten shillings on that—” He broke off mid-sentence and stared open-mouthed at Veronica—or, to be more specific, at the gun that she was aiming at his chest as if there were a bullseye painted on it. She had a steady hand, Flynn noticed.
“Veronica,” Flynn said quietly, “what’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said, and started to wave the gun around in a terrifyingly careless fashion. “Found this behind a cushion on your sofa. Doesn’t seem to me like a very safe place to keep a gun. Thought it might come in useful.”
It looked exactly like the gun that Archie had tried to press on Flynn. US Army–issue Colt. The Yanks in London in ’45 were giving them away on every street corner for a couple of quid.
“I’ve never shot anyone before,” Veronica said conversationally to her target, “but I suppose you simply pull the trigger. There can’t be much more to it than that, can there?”
Gammage sighed in the manner of a man who might not be a stranger to having a gun pulled on him. “All right, all right. Put that thing down, will you? It’s giving me the jitters.”
“Veronica?” Flynn said. “Do you want to give the gun to me?”
She handed it over—somewhat grudgingly—and said to Gammage, “Go on, then, give us a name, or he’ll shoot you.” She nodded at Flynn. “Won’t you?”
“Maybe. Just in the leg though. A name?” he prompted.
“He’s called Billy Braithwaite. Hadn’t seen him for years. He used to be a regular down at the Cat and Mutton in Hackney when I worked there. Ugly mug—sitting at the bar when you came in.”
“Shrapnel scar on his face? Told you to bet on Vidi Vici?”