Copyright & Information

Young Petrella

First published in 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Michael Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

EAN	ISBN	Edition
0755105311	9780755105311	Print
0755132106	9780755132102	Kindle
0755132475	9780755132478	Epub

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

Born in Lincolnshire, England, Michael Francis Gilbert graduated in law from the University of London in 1937, shortly after which he first spent some time teaching at a prep-school which was followed by six years serving with the Royal Horse Artillery. During World War II he was captured following service in North Africa and Italy, and his prisoner-of-war experiences later leading to the writing of the acclaimed novel ‘Death in Captivity’ in 1952.

After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor in London, but his writing continued throughout his legal career and in addition to novels he wrote stage plays and scripts for radio and television. He is, however, best remembered for his novels, which have been described as witty and meticulously-plotted espionage and police procedural thrillers, but which exemplify realism.

HRF Keating stated that ‘Smallbone Deceased’ was amongst the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "The plot," wrote Keating, "is in every way as good as those of Agatha Christie at her best: as neatly dovetailed, as inherently complex yet retaining a decent credibility, and as full of cunningly-suggested red herrings." It featured Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who went on to appear in later novels and short stories, and another series was built around Patrick Petrella, a London based police constable (later promoted) who was fluent in four languages and had a love for both poetry and fine wine. Other memorable characters around which Gilbert built stories included Calder and Behrens. They are elderly but quite amiable agents, who are nonetheless ruthless and prepared to take on tasks too much at the dirty end of the business for their younger colleagues. They are brought out of retirement periodically upon receiving a bank statement containing a code.

Much of Michael Gilbert’s writing was done on the train as he travelled from home to his office in London: "I always take a latish train to work," he explained in 1980, "and, of course, I go first class. I have no trouble in writing because I prepare a thorough synopsis beforehand.". After retirement from the law, however, he nevertheless continued and also reviewed for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, as well as editing ‘The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes’.

Gilbert was appointed CBE in 1980. Generally regarded as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the British crime writing fraternity, he was a founder-member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, before receiving the Lifetime ‘Anthony’ Achievement award at the 1990 Boucheron in London.

Michael Gilbert died in 2006, aged ninety three, and was survived by his wife and their two sons and five daughters.

Introduction

I have great affection for Patrick Petrella. My own youth as a writer and his youth as a policeman started together on the northern heights of London.

Time jerks by so quickly and so violently that these stories have become, in a sense, history. They tell of a time when the picture of the Metropolitan Police, as viewed by the public and their elected local representatives, differed significantly from the picture as it is seen today.

To the criminal the policeman has always been a natural enemy. To the vast majority of the people, who are not criminals, he used to be, just as naturally, a friend.

The criminal’s outlook has not, I think, changed. He and the policeman are both professionals engaged in a job of work. When professionals come into opposition there is a fight. Sometimes one side wins. Sometimes the other. There is little rancour.

With some sections of the public, however, there has unquestionably been a change. And whatever side one takes, no one can deny that it is a change for the worse. There exist now people, both black and white, who consider themselves to be oppressed. To them, quite naturally, the police are the arms of the oppressor. Summing up the opinions of a selected group of black youths, the researchers of the Policy Studies Institute recorded: “Everyone in the group held unfavourable or highly unfavourable attitudes towards the police force, ranging from deep bitterness and resentment to feelings of hatred and animosity.” This report was written in 1983, some twenty-five years after the period covered by these stories. Had such a view been generally current at the time it would, no doubt, have tinged them with darker colours.

The difficulties which Petrella did encounter have not been minimised. His superior officers often viewed the young man with a suspicion which was, I am afraid, sometimes well-founded. “Do you know,” Superintendent Barstow asked him, “why God gave young policemen two feet but only one head?” In two of the earlier stories I introduced Councillor Hayes, who was openly hostile to the police. The editor of the magazine in which the stories were appearing was upset. Surely, she said, I was exaggerating. Members of the Council would support, not oppose, the efforts of their own force. Readers of today’s press reports must judge for themselves whether I was exaggerating or understating the case.

So read the stories as history, as annals of a time lighter in some respects, darker in others, and differing in ways both large and small from the present. A time when £50 was a lot of money. A time when there were no such things as riot squads, and police were organised into divisions, not districts; a time when policemen might hope, if they did their job properly, to control the illegal import of cocaine; a time when the blue lamp did not mark the headquarters of a band of oppressors but was a lighthouse, shining hopefully in a dark and frightening street.

Prologue

The Conspirators

Every August, whilst Patrick Petrella was a detective constable up at Highside, the circus and funfair appeared on the Heath. If duty took him there, Petrella cut his visit as short as possible. Otherwise, his colleagues noticed, he avoided it altogether. Later, when he was promoted, and married, his wife remarked on the same peculiarity. He had not bothered to explain it to his colleagues at Highside. And he hesitated to do so even to his wife, from whom he had few secrets. In the end, he did tell her about it.

They were motoring in France, and had stopped in a village to buy stores for their midday meal. On the whitewashed wall, outside the mairie, a poster, faded by the hot sun of Provence, advertised the Cirque Jacquetti.

“Goodness,” said Petrella, “I wonder if Sam Borner still runs it. I don’t think he can do. He must be eighty, if he’s still alive.”

Still Petrella hesitated. For it had all happened a long time ago. And it had been the first time he had grasped the fact that hate can be more compelling than love; and the first time that he had seen, in action, a conspiracy to kill. The passage of time had buried these events deep, but small things – the distant roar of a caged lion, a clockwork clown tumbling about the pavement, a tattered circus poster – still had the power to twitch at his nerves.

“I’ll tell you when we stop for lunch,” he said. “It was my first murder case. I was eleven years old at the time.”

When you are young, each summer hangs on a thread of remembrance. A sight, a sound, a smell. To Patrick Petrella, that pre-war summer at Perpignan hung on a poster. Not faded and fly-blown like the one he had just seen, but eye-catching in its glorious colours. It depicted two white horses, in harness of black leather and trappings of gold, cantering round a sawdust ring, each ridden by a slender, graceful, grave-eyed lemur, dressed in a lady’s riding-habit with a tiny crimson cap on one side of its furry head.

Patrick was vague as to why his family were in Perpignan – as vague as to why they had spent the summer before in Cairo or the summer before that in Casablanca. He knew that his father worked for the Spanish Government, and he surmised that it was government business whch had brought them to the French side of the Pyrenees. It was something to do with refugees, and every now and then they would go for long drives through the mountains, meeting French and Spanish policemen and shepherds and muleteers on both sides of the frontier. But for the most part his father was closeted with Monsieur le Commissaire Theron, in the police station, and Patrick was free to amuse himself.

As well as his native Spanish he spoke streetboy Arabic and French, and he slipped about the sunlit streets of Perpignan, a thin, dark, friendly shadow, making new acquaintances along the river front, dropping one, picking up another, listening more than he spoke. It did not take him long to discover the Cirque Jacquetti in the Champ des Martyrs, the little plateau on the inland side of the city where the dragoons had shot and sabred more than a hundred unarmed Huguenots during the Repression.

The Champ des Martyrs was the permanent base of the Jacquettis. It was from there that its component parts, the first and second-ring circuses, and the funfair, sometimes operating with the circus, and sometimes on its own, went out on planned marches, south to the Rock of Gibraltar, north as far as Bruges and Ostend, where they met, but did not trespass on, the territory of the other great European troupe, the German Müller-Hilde. Perpignan was their base. Patrick liked it best when, as now, it was almost empty. August was the peak of the trouping season. All that was left behind, inside the high wire perimeter, was a shed full of old funfair machinery, a row of caravans, most of them empty, the cages where the big cats lived, the stables for the horses, the kennels for the dogs, and a handful of people.

Manfredo and Ramon were called brothers, although, in the complicated in-breeding of circus life, no one quite knew whether they were really brothers, half-brothers, or cousins. Both were swarthy, handsome and attractive, and both were bullies, in the way that men who spend their lives controlling big cats often are.

Domenico Stromboli, who came from Naples, looked after the dogs. Or, to be truthful, the dogs looked after Stromboli. He was a cripple. Polio had reduced his arms and one of his legs to withered sticks. The circus had built him a little padded carriage, which two of the six Alsatians took turns to pull. He had first appeared, to Patrick’s fascinated gaze, driving at a hand-canter across the wide and dusty compound, with two Alsatian dogs running escort in front of him and two more behind, surrounded by a tumbling, snapping, skirmishing pack of poodles.

Patrick had got into the closely guarded enclosure by the kindness of his special friend, Auguste. Auguste was a stand-in clown. He looked after the horses. His particular charges were Rosalie and Marguerite, the beautiful white thoroughbreds, whose likeness Patrick had so often admired on the poster. They were resting for a few weeks. Sam Borner, who had married, twenty years before, into the Jacquetti family, and had now the controlling voice in the circus, knew the virtue of not overdriving a willing and successful turn.

“That’s his caravan,” said Auguste. “Would you like to have a peep at it?”

They climbed the stairs and opened the door, cut in two halves, heavy as a lock gate, built to last, like everything in that wonderful vehicle.

Patrick thought he had never seen anything so entrancing in his whole life. It was at once snug and spacious, and entirely beautiful.

Everything that could shine, shone. The polished teakwood tables, and settles and built-in cupboards; the brass fittings of the lamps, and the window and door fittings, and the ship’s chronometer above the stove, itself a gleaming altar of glazed brick and winking steel. In one corner stood the cage where Leopold and Lorenzo, the riding lemurs lived. They sat on a log and stared back at Patrick as he gazed, round-eyed, at them.

He was dark bottle-green all over, except for plum-coloured ruffs around his legs. His head was cocked on one side, and a single round yellow eye was fixed on the boy.

“What a beauty,” said the bird complacently. It swung down neatly from the rail on top of the cupboard and waddled along the window-seat.

“Bite your ear off,” said Auguste. “Just you ask Ramon or Manfredo. It’s war to the knife between them and Nestor. They used to tease him – pull his tail feathers out. He bit Manfredo through the thumb. Nearly cut it off.”

Patrick watched the parrot, scarcely daring to breathe. It sidled along the tabletop towards him, still transfixing him with one unwinking yellow eye. Then it dipped its green head suddenly forward, caught the corner of Patrick’s handkerchief, and whipped it out of his pocket.

“Hey!” said the parrot, dropped the handkerchief and broke into a scream of laughter.

“He does like you, see,” said a long-legged, dark-haired girl. She had come out of the back part of the caravan, where she had been tidying and cleaning the bedroom. “If he takes something of yours, it shows he likes you.”

She picked up the parrot without fuss, held it in one hand, and smoothed its head feathers with the other. The parrot preened itself.

“This person is Nina,” said Auguste. “She is a wonderful girl. She is loved by all creatures, and fears none.”

Although he was only eleven, Patrick was an observant boy, and when Auguste said “creatures” it occurred to him that he might be including two-legged creatures as well. She was a very attractive girl.

The week that followed was a week of unmixed delight. Tolerated by old Stromboli, encouraged by Auguste and Nina, he explored every corner of the Jacquetti encampment. He avoided Ramon and Manfredo and studied the great Sam Borner, owner and boss of the Jacquettis, and his wife Donna, from a respectful distance. But these were only the humans. It was the animals which entranced him. The six great Alsatian dogs, who were the policemen of the kingdom, and the tumbling crowd of poodles who formed the CID – sharp-eyed, sneaky, ubiquitous. The old circus horses, their working life over, who lived at ease, grazing behind the caravans by day and stabled by night in the shed opposite Sam Borner’s caravan. Rosalie and Marguerite, queens of the ring, each with a stall of her own, with a name on a shingle nailed over it; the great cats, in their cages at the far end of the enclosure, to be watched like Ramon and Manfredo, but not approached. White doves which lived on the rafters of the pony shed, and would come to Nina when she whistled. A marmoset which shared Auguste’s caravan, and spent its day vainly trying to catch the pigeons. Leopold and Lorenzo the lemurs, who could ride and look after horses as well as any stable boy, who lived in Sam Borner’s caravan, and were taken out of their cage by Nina every afternoon for a walk on long leather leads; and Nestor the parrot, said to be more than a hundred years old, and very wise.

It was at the end of that week, on the Sunday morning, that Monsieur Theron came to call on Patrick’s father.

Their talk took place in the front sitting room, a place of French rectitude and gloom. M. Theron was a middle-aged Basque with a short brown beard and a deceptively mild appearance. It was later to deceive the Germans, to their undoing. Patrick sat, unnoticed, in a corner behind a table covered with family photographs. He listened, in growing horror, to what was being recounted.

“Discovered at six o’clock this morning. The doctor said that death must have occurred at least five hours before. Not more than seven.”

Patrick had heard only scraps of the earlier conversation. He had thought they were talking about refugees. Now he wished that he had listened. Because it was to do with the circus. Someone had been killed.

So! It was Manfredo or Ramon. Patrick felt a sense of relief. It would have been terrible if it had been one of his friends: Auguste, or Nina, or Stromboli. Even the majestic Sam Borner, or his kindly little wife. If someone had to be dead, better one of the savage Spaniards.

“It will be difficult to prove anything,” said M. Theron. “It is true that the field is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, but an active man could surmount it almost anywhere.”

“Spaniards—” said M. Theron, and then stopped. It had occurred to him that what he was about to say might not, in the circumstances, be very tactful.

“Can behave like wild beasts,” agreed Patrick’s father, smoothly. “But there is usually some particular reason for a killing as cold-blooded as this would seem to have been.”

“The brothers were drinking in the Café d’Algerie – it is a riverside drinking place – until close on eleven o’clock. They were excited, and shouting. They left separately. So far that is all we have established.”

“It is not true that anyone from outside could get over the wire fence and into the field of the circus. By day, it would be difficult. By night, impossible.”

Patrick’s father looked at him seriously. He said, “I have no official standing here. M. Theron consults me because he is friendly and, I suspect, a little out of his depth with a case which involves two Spaniards, a Yorkshireman with a Milanese wife, a Neapolitan, a Belgian, and a local girl.”

“When you grow up, and become a policeman,” said his father, “as I believe is your intention, you will find that it is a great advantage not to appear too attentive. As I was saying, I have no status in this matter. But if what you tell me is true, it is clearly a fact of importance, which should be established in a proper scientific manner. We will take a walk together, this evening, after dinner.”

They approached the Champs des Martyrs with due precaution, from the back. It was a soft night, with the moon half full. Ahead of them loomed the bulk of the machinery shed, concealing them from view. The corner of the wire fence was supported here by an upright of iron angle-bar.

“This would be the best place,” said Patrick’s father. He spoke in a whisper. “Will you go over, or shall I?”

He gripped the stanchion, and climbed up, easily enough, using the strands of the wire as steps. He had reached the top, and was steadying himself, with one hand on the roof of the shed, when a shrill yap sounded. As Patrick dropped to the ground, two dark forms materialised at the corner of the shed.

Patrick moved out from behind the shed, into the moonlight. The Alsatians were uncertain. The boy looked, and smelled, like someone they knew, but was behaving suspiciously. A small black dog ran up. Patrick stopped, and it jumped into his arms and started licking his face. The Alsatians lost interest. If Kiki vouched for the stranger, he was all right. Patrick walked back to his father, put the toy poodle gently down and climbed out.

The processes of the law are never quick. It was nearly a week later that Sam Borner’s wife called on them. Donna Borner had been fifteen, a promising equestrienne, when Sam had married her and inherited his slice of the Jacquetti enterprise. Twenty-five years of married life and the rearing of three sons had rounded out her figure and engraved some wrinkles on her face but, until that black week, life had treated her kindly.

She said, in an accent in which her north Italian consonants mixed curiously with broad Yorkshire vowels, “They have taken Sam for questioning. They took him this morning. They will not let me see him. It is a terrible mistake.”

Patrick’s father made her sit down. He talked to her, and Patrick admired the skill with which he extracted the facts without seeming to ask any questions at all.

The police, at first, had suspected Ramon. He was a violent man, he had been drinking, he had been the last person seen with Manfredo. But he could have had no hand in the killing. When he left the café he had caused an uproar by trying to break into the house of a girl he knew. The police had been called. He had been arrested, and had spent the night in one of the police lockups. As soon as this was established he had, of course, to be released.

“I should not have let him go quite so quickly,” said Patrick’s father. “I should like to know exactly at what time he caused this convenient uproar.”

Donna Borner was uncertain. What she did know was that Ramon, exculpated, had turned inquisitor. He had vowed to find the killer of his brother. And the possible suspects were so very few. The killing had occurred just outside the pony shed, inside the camp. It was not at all easy for an outsider to get in undetected, because of the dogs.

Patrick’s father nodded. He said that he knew about the dogs. Who could have been in the camp, legitimately, that night?

The answer was simple. Stromboli, neither of whose arms was strong enough to lift a tack hammer, let alone a sledge hammer. Auguste, who had a caravan in the middle of the line of caravans. Donna herself, and her husband. They had the caravan at the end, nearest to the pony shed. The other caravans belonged to people who were out on circuit, and they were empty. Ramon and Manfredo had a caravan at the far end, near the cages of the big cats who were in their charge.

Patrick’s father had a pencil in his hand, and was drawing a little sketch as she spoke, marking in the stables, the dog kennels, the machine sheds and the cages, round three sides of a square, and the line of caravans along the top.

“How did you know about Nina?” asked Donna. “Oh, I see. . .” She had spotted Patrick, in his favourite place in the corner. “The boy told you. He is friends with all at the camp. It could not have been Nina. She is a local girl. She sleeps at home.”

Patrick’s father was drawing a series of little arrows on his diagram. One ran from the corner behind the shed to the dog kennels; a second from the kennels to the pony stables; a third from the stables to the line of caravans.

“Certainly, it could have been Auguste,” agreed M. Theron. “Although he is thin as a rush, he is tough as a rush, too, and has very strong wrists and forearms. All clowns have. It is their early training in tumbling. Certainly he had a motive also. Not long ago he interfered to defend Nina when Manfredo was being offensive, and received a thrashing for his pains.”

“Fortunately for him – unfortunately for Monsieur Borner – Auguste can show that he was nowhere near the camp that night.” He looked out of the corner of his eye at Patrick, and said: “Auguste spent that night with Nina, in her house.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Patrick impatiently. “We all knew that Auguste was Nina’s lover. That’s why he stuck up for her, and got knocked about by Manfredo. Manfredo wanted her himself. I didn’t say anything about it because I wasn’t sure whether it was a terribly good alibi. After all, if she was fond of him, she’d say he was there, wouldn’t she?”

M. Theron smiled, and said, “Very true. But in this case the concierge of the house where Nina lodges confirms it. Auguste arrived at ten o’clock in the evening, and did not leave until six o’clock the following morning.”

“A concierge is a zealous watchdog,” said Patrick’s father. “But even she must sleep sometimes.”

“Agreed,” said M. Theron. “But this one did not go to bed before one o’clock. Until that time she could hear the man and girl laughing and talking in their room. Manfredo, remember, was dead by one o’clock.”

“That’s true enough,” said Patrick. “I’ve heard Nestor – he’s the Borners’ parrot – imitate him exactly. But then, he can take off all of them.”

“I am a man of logic,” he said. “If it be accepted that no one except its regular inmates could enter the camp after dark without being detected by the dogs, we have the following position. A man is struck down and killed, with a heavy instrument – most probably of metal and circular in shape, according to the autopsy – a sledge hammer, perhaps. The man who is killed was a bully, and a lecher. Any one of his fellows might have had cause to strike the blow. When was the blow struck? Between eleven o’clock and one o’clock, says the doctor. But we can be more precise than that. The man Stromboli heard Manfredo come back to the camp.”

“Yes. That is so. We learned it only this morning. The old man sleeps with his dogs. The sharp-eared caniches! They woke him at midnight. He heard Manfredo. The inmates, when they come in late, they do not use the gate. There are places at the back where they climb through the wire.”

“He knew it must be one of the regulars,” said Patrick’s father. “But how did he know it was Manfredo?”

“He heard him. Manfredo was intoxicated. And he was talking to himself – loudly.”

“He says no. He would not interfere with Manfredo sober. Certainly not when he was intoxicated.”

Patrick’s father had taken out his sketch plan. Now he marked a spot behind the row of machinery sheds.

“Manfredo would climb in on the south side, behind the machinery sheds – here? Emerge by the end of the sheds, pass Stromboli and the dogs – so? And make his way across the open centre of the compound, towards the row of caravans on the north side.”

M. Theron nodded. “And these caravans, remember, Senor Petrella, at that precise moment, were all empty save one. The large caravan at the end, occupied by Borner and his wife. Let us suppose that Borner hears this sot approaching. Staggering across the open. He sees his chance. He picks up a heavy, iron tent hammer. He creeps up behind him. One blow, and it is finished.”

“He had a reason. All the circus knew it. I have no doubt your boy knows it, too.”

“It was about ten days ago,” said Patrick unhappily. “Three days before Manfredo was killed. Nina was taking Leopold and Lorenzo for their afternoon walk – they are the lemurs, who live in Sam Borner’s caravan and ride the ponies. Lorenzo slipped his leash, got into Manfredo’s caravan and stole an orange. They’re both terrible thieves. Manfredo chased him out, and Lorenzo got into a tree, and started to eat the orange and throw the peel at Manfredo. Everyone was laughing – except Manfredo. He was mad. He got his long whip, the one he uses on his cats, and flicked Lorenzo with it. It nearly cut his tail off.”

“And do you think,” said his father, “that that would be sufficient provocation—?”

“Circus people think of their animals as children,” said M. Theron. “If someone flicked your child with a whip—?”

“They’re terribly valuable, too,” said Patrick. “They ride Rosalie and Marguerite, you see. It’s one of the main attractions of the circus. They’re awfully clever with them. Just like real jockeys. It’s taken Sam fifteen years to train them.”

Patrick broke off. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be talking too much. His father had returned to his sketch plan.

“One thing puzzles me,” he said. “Manfredo was found in the entrance of the stable.”

“If you are thinking,” said M. Theron, with a smile, “that one of the horses may have kicked him, I can assure you that it is impossible. Unless it had legs of elastic! The nearest horse was tethered in its stall a full ten paces from the door.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was wondering what he was doing there at all. His caravan is at the other end of the line. Crossing the open compound he would go to the right to get to it. Why did he bear left-handed towards the stables?”

“Who knows?” said M. Theron. “He was drunk. He may have lost direction.”

“He might,” said Patrick’s father. “It’s curious, all the same.” He was frowning in a way that Patrick recognised. He said, “I, too, am a man of logic. I will concede to you that Borner is the only man who could have done this thing by himself. His wife would be a tacit accomplice, but we need not concern ourselves with her. Have you, however, considered that it could have been done, quite easily, by two people in concert – a conspiracy?”

“I will suggest two possible combinations. There may well be more. Clearly Auguste and Nina could have worked it. No one saw Auguste after eleven o’clock. The concierge heard his high-pitched voice. A voice which, as we have heard, even the parrot could imitate. If a parrot, how much more easily could a clever girl do so?”

M. Theron frowned and said, “Auguste seems to me – somehow – pyschologically an unlikely murderer.”

“Agreed. Then let me suggest a second one. Ramon. Who knows what tensions may grow between brothers? Did not Cain kill Abel?”

“But Ramon was in a police station cell by midnight. Agreed. But suppose he followed his brother back to the circus, killed him at half past eleven, and immediately took steps to have himself arrested. That trouble he stirred up – it seemed to me a little obvious even at the time.”

“But we are told that Manfredo was alive at twelve. Who by? By Stromboli. But who knows that he may not be in with Ramon? The two of them together—”

“A conspiracy,” said M. Theron. He sounded unhappy; as a man may, who has arrived at what seems to be the unique solution of a problem, and perceived that it may, at best, be one of three.

“I worked out a fourth possibility,” said Patrick’s father, “involving Ramon, Stromboli and Sam Borner.”

“No, no,” said M. Theron. “Three is enough. You have said quite sufficient to make me doubt my own diagnosis. Possibly I ought to let Mr. Borner go? It is not right to detain a man who might be innocent. On the other hand, it might be wise to detain him for his own protection. That brute, Ramon, has sworn to avenge his brother.”

He took himself off, a worried frown on his good-natured face. After he had gone, Patrick said to his father, “Did you really believe any of those ideas, or did you make them up to get Sam out of a hole?”

Patrick’s father looked hard at him. If his son was capable of pulling his leg, he must be growing up.

“They were quite all right,” said Patrick. “Quite logical. They could have planned it like that. The thing is, though, that they wouldn’t. Auguste isn’t the sort of person to kill anyone. And Ramon bickers a lot with Manfredo, but he wouldn’t kill him. Manfredo was killed by someone who hated him. I’m positive of that.”

“Not by Sam,” said Patrick. He said it in such an odd tone, that his father looked at him again. The boy had gone white.

The idea had not come to him suddenly. It had grown, from little things; things noticed, things heard, half observation, half impression. It was not a logical solution. It was more like a picture. He saw Manfredo, full of wine, muttering and stumbling, climbing through the wire perimeter at the well-known place, steering an unsteady course across the dusty, moonlit compound, towards his caravan and bed. And then – his father had noticed it – something must have diverted him. Patrick did not believe that Manfredo drifted off course. A drunken man has a compass which takes him to his own bed. Something had attracted him to the front of the pony shed and, inside that dark entrance, the murderer was crouched, ready to kill.

In three or four days, the main circus would be back, the camp would be full of shouting, working, jostling people; the lights would be on most of the night as they repaired, against time, machinery and equipment for the autumn circuit. The caravans would all be occupied, the clues would be trampled underfoot and the scent would be cold. Also his mother would be back.

She had more belief in the value of an English boarding school than either Patrick or his father. Her first experiment had been unsuccessful. Three years before she had chosen a school on paper and dispatched Patrick to it without further enquiry. A few weeks after his arrival the headmaster’s son, a lout of ten, had tried to bully this eight-year-old new boy. He had been half killed for his pains. Patrick had learned about fighting from the small banditti of the slums of Madrid. His methods were unorthodox but drastic. The headmaster had beaten Patrick, but done nothing to his son. That was quite enough, and Patrick had removed himself and made his way home. When his father had heard what he had to say he had supported him and Patrick had resumed the enjoyable freedom of life with his peripatetic family.

Now, he realised, things were different. His mother had departed for England and set about a personal inspection of schools and headmasters coupled with talks to friends who had young sons. This time, no doubt, she would find a decent school for him. And when she got back his liberty would be curtailed.

He spent the next two days on the quayside. Anyone will talk to a polite, good looking, eleven-year-old boy. Patrick listened. There was a single piece of information that he needed. It was late on the evening of the second day – after nine o’clock – that the son of the proprietor of one of the waterside cafés brought him the news. Patrick went back with him, to confirm it. He wanted no slip-up. The boys stood and peered through the bead-curtained window. Ramon was sitting at a table, staring at the wall. There was a half-empty bottle on the table.

“It’s his second,” said the boy. “If he makes trouble, my father and his brother will handle him. Shall we stay to watch?”

“Why waste money?” said the boy. “Use ours. It is in the passage. I will show you.”

Patrick spoke to the housekeeper. His father was out, and would not be back until late.

“When he comes,” said Patrick, “tell him – tell him that I am going with some of my friends for a moonlight picnic—”

Ten minutes later, he was climbing, alone, into the circus enclosure. When the poodles had inspected him, and the Alsatians had sniffed, and passed him, he walked round the perimeter of the enclosure, keeping as much as possible in the shadows, until he came to the line of caravans. Here he moved very cautiously. He was making for an empty caravan, next to the Borners’ at the end of the line. There was a light in the sleeping quarters of the Borners’ van. That would be Donna. Even when she got into bed and turned out her light, she would probably not sleep very soundly. She would be worrying about Sam. Great care was necessary.

Patrick fitted into the lock of the empty caravan the key which Nina had, very unwillingly, lent to him, eased it round gently, and went in. It was not so elaborately equipped as the Borners’ caravan, but was constructed on the same lines. There was a cushioned couch under the side window. Patrick climbed onto it, and opened the window.

It was a night of magic. The full face of the moon looked down from a sky of black velvet. It was so bright that it seemed to be generating a light and heat of its own.

And it was very quiet. Patrick could hear the clack of sharp little hoofs on the concrete as Rosalie or Marguerite moved in her stall, and, away on the far side of the compound, a throaty rumble as old Rosso the lion dreamed of the forests of his youth.

From where he knelt, every detail of the living room of the Borners’ caravan was picked out in the cold white moonlight. Opposite to him, on his perch by the open window, sat Nestor, the big green parrot. His eyes were shut. Of Nestor, alone among all the birds and animals of the circus, Patrick was afraid. He had been afraid since he had discovered, in a book of his father’s, that Nestor was his real name. Nestor notabilis, the sheep-killing parrot of Australia and New Zealand. He had read how they would fly on to a terrified and cornered sheep and peck through its back, into its liver. He had read, too, how the enraged farmers tried to trap them and how the parrots, endowed with almost human cunning and calculation, had avoided all the snares that were set for them, and even set traps themselves in return.

Nestor had opened his eyes. For a moment, Patrick thought he had seen him; that he was going to open his hooked beak, and scream out a warning to the camp. Then he saw that Nestor had his head cocked and was listening.

Nestor sidled along his perch towards Leopold and Lorenzo. Patrick could see that they, too, were awake, moving like shadows, noiselessly, from side to side in their cage.

The door of their cage was fastened with a simple bolt, set well out of reach of the lemurs’ arms. Nestor reached out with his beak, lifted the arm of the bolt, and struck it. There was a tiny, metallic clang as the door swung open, and the monkeys were gone, out of the cage, and out of the window. Nestor hopped on to the sill, and the next moment, he was gone, too. Only the door of the cage, swinging open, showed Patrick that he had not imagined the whole thing.

As he climbed down the steps of the caravan he could see Ramon clearly. The man had come out from behind the shed, and was tacking, unsteadily, across the open, moonlit square.

Then the voice of Auguste spoke from the shadows by the stable. It called out, “Ramon.” The imitation was so perfect that even Patrick, who knew it was Nestor, was deceived for a moment.

Ramon swung to his left. The voice added three unforgivable words in gutter Spanish. Ramon broke into a shambling run. Patrick was close enough to see the moonlight glinting from the knife which he carried, blade upwards, Spanish-fashion, in his left hand. Patrick padded after him, his plimsolls noiseless in the dust. As he rounded the corner, the voice of Auguste spoke for the third time. It came from inside the stable now, rather high up, towards the right.

The moonlight illuminated a small area in the mouth of the shed. In the middle, Ramon stood swaying. On the left – Patrick’s heart missed a beat as he saw it – was the pony Rosalie. She had been moved by the lemurs out of her stall, and now stood, fastened only by her head rope, to a ring just inside the door. Leopold sat astride her, jockey-wise. Lorenzo crouched on the edge of the stall by her head.

For a heartbeat, no one moved. Then Lorenzo bent forward and bit Rosalie’s ear. At the same moment, Ramon stumbled. The stumble saved his life. Rosalie’s steel-tipped hoof, lashing out, missed his head, but hit him, with a splintering crack, in the left shoulder. He went down, rolled like an acrobat, and came up on his feet again. The crack must have been his collarbone going, for his left arm was hanging limp. The shock had knocked all the drink out of him.

Rosalie was whinnying and stamping behind him, but he ignored her. He was staring, his face pale as the moon itself, at the rafter above his head.

Nestor was sitting there. He stared down at him with unblinking yellow eyes. It was a battle of wills, and the stronger will prevailed. Ramon turned on his heel and walked away. As he went the great green parrot gave a scream of derision and triumph.

“So,” said M. Theron. “The brother, Ramon, has taken himself off. He crossed the frontier, illicitly, in the early hours of the morning. A guardia saw him, but could not stop him.”

“Do we want to stop him?” asked Patrick’s father. “Going off like that – it amounts to an admission of guilt. You will have to let Mr. Borner go, now.”

“Of course. I have done so,” said M. Theron. “It is unsatisfactory, all the same. I like a case to be neatly rounded. All the strings tied up. I should like to know why he killed his brother, and what he did it with. And who helped him. For it must have been the work of confederates.”

“I don’t suppose we shall ever know the real truth,” said Patrick’s father. And to Patrick, after M. Theron had taken himself off, he said, “You’re looking absolutely done. You must have been out very late last night. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“It was a last fling,” said his father. “Your mother’s back today. I’ve had a letter from her. She’s chosen the school. She enclosed the prospectus. It’s on the South Downs. Association football in the Christmas term and Rugby football in the Easter term. Two headmasters and a qualified matron. It sounds a splendid place, this time. Much better than the last one we tried.”

Detective Constable

Who Has Seen the Wind?

To Detective Chief Inspector Haxtell education was something you dodged at school and picked up afterwards as you went along.

“All I need in my job,” he would say, “I learned in the street.” And he would glare down at Detective Petrella, whom he had once found improving his mind with Dr. Bentley’s Dissertation on Fallacies at a time when he should have been thumbing his way through the current number of Hue & Cry.

Petrella was, of course, an unusual detective constable. He spoke four languages. One of them was Arabic, for he had attended the University at Beirut. He knew about subjects like viniculture and the theory of the five-lever lock; and had an endlessly enquiring mind.

“Curiosity,” he said. “Know your people. If you don’t know, ask questions. Find out. It’s better than book-learning.”

Petrella accepted the rebuke in good part. There was a lot of truth in it. Most police work was knowledge; knowledge of an infinity of small, everyday facts, unimportant by themselves, deadly when taken together.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the Chief Inspector, he retained an obstinate conviction that there were other things as well; deeper things and finer things; colours, shapes and sounds of absolute beauty, unconnected with the world of small people in small houses in grey streets. And whilst in one pocket of his old raincoat he might carry Moriarty’s Police Law, in the other would lie, dog-eared with use, the Golden Treasury of Palgrave.

“She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies,” said Petrella, and, “That car’s been there a long time. If it’s still there when I come back it might be worth looking into.”

He was on his way to Lavender Street to see a man called Perkoff about a missing bicycle. It was as he was walking down Barnaby Passage that he forgot poetry and remembered that he was a policeman.

For something was missing. Something as closely connected with Barnaby Passage as mild with bitter or bacon with eggs. The noise of the Harrington children at play.

There were six of them, and Barnaby Passage, which ran alongside their back garden, was their stamping ground.

On the last occasion that Petrella had walked through it, a well-aimed potato had carried away his hat and he had turned in time to see the elfin face of Micky Harrington disappear behind a row of dustbins. He had done nothing about it, first because it did not befit the dignity of a plainclothes detective to chase a small boy, and secondly because he would not have had the smallest chance of catching him.