‘The Thuggery Affair’, Part Five
Chapter Nine: Character Part
While Peter is racing around the countryside being shot at, Lawrie is on the train to Colebridge, dressed as a hot chick but being very Lawrie:
“…she liked to have active adult males as her travelling companions, not because they were more entertaining but because if there were an accident they would naturally devote themselves to seeing that Lawrie, being women and children, was rescued first.”
Lawrie might soon need rescuing because Red Ted, one of The Thuggery, is in her carriage. But it seems he doesn’t recognise her due to her dishy appearance. In fact, he’s showing off for her benefit and she’s flattered. Lawrie joins him in some minor rebellion against a couple of old folk and is pleased when the woman calls her a “painted little piece”.
Kate has noted that I should pay attention to the songs, so I will report here that Red Ted’s transistor radio is now playing Marching through Madrid – so at this moment, Peter’s bike is being steamrollered in the tar. Possibly it’s also a nod towards the travelling Lawrie is currently doing (and that Peter is not going to be doing on his bike). Then comes You’ll Never Walk Alone (be brave, Lawrie) and Another Spring (Lawrie is no spring chicken, she says she’s fifteen and a half! But she’s only thirteen, right? If Ginty turned fifteen in January, no more than two months earlier, the twins must be thirteen and Peter is fourteen.) Then as the train stops, it’s P.S. I Love You and Red Ted makes his move with this very romantic line:
“What’s new, slicklet chicklet? Do we rove to the caff and have ourselves a ball?”
How could any girl resist? Lawrie, now using her future-professional-actress name Sophia Lawrence, accompanies Red Ted to a coffee bar where she gazes with contempt at the amateurish make-up of some of the other chicks and feels “blissfully, shiveringly happy” at being part of Red Ted’s gang. Then she and Red Ted go off to the cinema. (Song: She Loves You, Yeah Yeah Yeah – well, yes, she does.)
But it’s that scary science fiction film, and Red Ted murmurs, “You chuffed I made Jukie make you my watch this noon ’n night?” and Lawrie suddenly remembers he’s a Thug and she’s meant to be taking the pigeon to the police. It does seem completely in character for her to have got so caught up in playing a role that she forgets reality. And her acting skills do come in handy – she convinces him she’s only going to the loo and (after a brief panic attack in the cubicle) escapes by breaking through a window and dropping into an alley. Where she’s picked up by the police.
Somehow, things always work out for Lawrie, no matter how ridiculously she behaves.
Chapter Ten: Telling the Tale
This is just like the time Lawrie got caught without her bus fare in The Marlows and the Traitor. The police see a “scruffily dressed girl” and refuse to believe she’s Lawrence Marlow, the respectable daughter of a navy captain. She certainly doesn’t help herself by giving her stage name and being smeared in make-up, but surely she sounds exactly like what she is, an upper-middle class girl from a posh boarding school. Admittedly, the pigeon story is a bit far-fetched and she has lost the drug capsule, but she does have an actual pigeon with suspicious harness and a cigarette packet with a written threat. For a moment, it seems the Inspector will be able to verify her identity from the library books, but the librarian reports that the books were borrowed by “D. Gates” of Westbridge, not a Marlow of Trennels Old Farm. It’s Doris the maid (why are her books at Trennels?), but Lawrie does her usual bursting-into-tears thing and can’t explain properly.
Fortunately, Mrs Marlow happens to phone the police station right then, looking for her missing daughter, and she and Peter soon turn up to say exactly what Lawrie has said:
“The only difference was, [the Inspector] obviously believed Peter.”
It is sadly often the case, even now, that authority figures pay more attention to a male speaker than a female speaker. Even when the female speaker is a lot more coherent than Lawrie.
The problem is that Patrick seems to have disappeared. The Inspector decides to send the Marlows home and get the Culverstone sergeant to investigate further, but just as the Marlows are leaving, there’s another phone call. Miss Culver’s housekeeper’s daughter has found a boy’s body in the storeroom under a rug! They’re too frightened to look at his face and don’t even know if he’s dead, but he’s clutching a rosary with the initials P.M.A.M.! And Peter identifies this as belonging to “Patrick Michael Anthony Mary”!
I don’t know what’s more ridiculous, that the two women at the Culver place can’t even look at the boy (what if he’s bleeding to death and needs urgent first aid?) or that one of Patrick’s names is Mary. (It can’t be, can it? Is the ‘Mary’ just a reminder on the rosary to pray to Mary Mother of God?)
I don’t think the body is Patrick. I think it’s a Thug. I don’t know why he’s got Patrick’s rosary, though. Maybe he ripped it from Patrick while they were fighting.
Then another significant song comes on the radio: There’s a Hole in My Bucket. Which prompts Peter to look in Lawrie’s mackintosh pocket, which has a big hole in it, which means the drug capsule has fallen into the lining of her mackintosh (along with a lot of other things Lawrie has lost). Finally, the police have their evidence!
Peter, by the way, calls Lawrie a “prehistoric aborigine” when he discovers this. Nice one, Peter, you’ve managed to be sexist, classist and racist in one book.
Next: The Dovecote at Monks’ Culvery
