No Comebacks

A dozen sacks had fallen out of the back of the open doors and four had split open. The moonlight shone on the heaps of brown fertilizer between the torn plastic. The constable had his torch out and played it over the mess. As Murphy told his cellmate later, there are some days when nothing, but absolutely nothing, goes right.

By moon and torchlight there was no mistaking the great maw of the bazooka jutting upwards, nor the shapes of the machine guns protruding from the torn sacks. Murphy's stomach turned.

The Irish police do not normally carry handguns, but when on escort duty for a minister, they do. The sergeant's automatic was pointing at Murphy's stomach.

Murphy sighed. It was just one of those days. He had not only failed signally to hijack 9000 bottles of brandy, but had managed to intercept someone's clandestine arms shipment and he had little doubt who that 'someone' might be. He could think of several places he would like to be for the next two years, but the streets of Dublin were not the safest places on that list.

He raised his hands slowly.

'I have a little confession to make,' he said.

MONEY WITH MENACES

IF SAMUEL NUTKIN had not dropped his glasses case between the cushions of his seat on the commuter train from Edenbridge to London that morning, none of this would ever have happened. But he did drop them, slipped his hand between the cushions to retrieve them, and the die was cast.

His fumbling fingers encountered not only his glasses case, but a slim magazine evidently stuffed there by the former occupant of the seat. Believing it to be a railway timetable, he idly withdrew it. Not that he needed a railway timetable. After twenty-five years of taking the same train at the same hour from the small and sinless commuter town of Edenbridge to Charing Cross station, and returning on the same train at the same time from Cannon Street station to Kent each evening, he had no need of railway timetables. It was just passing curiosity.

When he glanced at the front cover Mr Nutkin's face coloured up red, and he hastily stuffed it back down the cushions. He looked round the compartment to see if anyone had noticed what he had found. Opposite him two Financial Times, a Times and a Guardian nodded back at him with the rhythm of the train, their readers invisible behind the city prices section. To his left old Fogarty pored over the crossword puzzle and to his right, outside the window, Hither Green station flashed past uncaring. Samuel Nutkin breathed out in relief.

The magazine had been small with a glossy cover. Across the top were the words New Circle, evidently the title of the publication, and along the bottom of the cover page another phrase, 'Singles, Couples, Groups — the contact magazine for the sexually aware'. Between the two lines of print the centre of the cover page was occupied by a photograph of a large lady with a jutting chest, her face blocked out by a white square which announced her as 'Advertiser H331'. Mr Nutkin had never seen such a magazine before, but he thought out the implications of his find all the way to Charing Cross.

As the doors down the train swung open in unison to decant their cargoes of commuters into the maelstrom of platform 6, Samuel Nutkin delayed his departure by fussing with his briefcase, rolled umbrella and bowler hat until he was last out of the compartment. Finally, aghast at his daring, he slipped the magazine from its place between the cushions into his briefcase, and joined the sea of other bowler hats moving towards the ticket barrier, season tickets extended.

It was an uncomfortable walk from the train to the subway, down the line to the Mansion House station, up the stairs to Great Trinity Lane and along Cannon Street to the office block of the insurance company where he worked as a clerk. He had heard once of a man who was knocked over by a car and when they emptied his pockets at the hospital they found a packet of pornographic pictures. The memory haunted Samuel Nutkin. How on earth could one ever explain such a thing? The shame, the embarrassment, would be unbearable. To lie there with a leg in traction, knowing that everyone knew one's secret tastes. He was especially careful crossing the road that morning until he reached the insurance company offices.

From all of which one may gather that Mr Nutkin was not used to this sort of thing. There was a man once who reckoned that human beings tend to imitate the nicknames given them in an idle moment. Call a man 'Butch' and he will swagger; call him 'Killer' and he will walk around with narrowed eyes and try to talk like Bogart. Funny men have to go on telling jokes and clowning until they crack up from the strain. Samuel Nutkin was just ten years old when a boy at school who had read the tales of Beatrix Potter called him Squirrel, and he was doomed.

He had worked in the City of London since, as a young man of twenty-three, he came out of the army at the end of the war with the rank of corporal. In those days he had been lucky to get the job, a safe job with a pension at the end of it, clerking for a giant insurance company with worldwide ramifications, safe as the Bank of England that stood not 500 yards away. Getting that job had marked Samuel Nutkin's entry into the City, square-mile headquarters of a vast economic, commercial and banking octopus whose tentacles spread to every corner of the globe.

He had loved the City in those days of the late forties, wandering round in the lunch hour looking at the timeless streets — Bread Street, Cornhffl, Poultry and London Wall — dating back to the Middle Ages when they really did sell bread and corn and poultry and mark the walled city of London. He was impressed that it was out of these sober stone piles that merchant adventurers had secured financial backing to sail away to the lands of brown, black and yellow men, to trade and dig and mine and scavenge, sending the booty back to the City, to insure and bank and invest until decisions taken in this square mile of boardrooms and counting houses could affect whether a million lesser breeds worked or starved. That these men had really been the world's most successful looters never occurred to him. Samuel Nutkin was very loyal.

Time passed and after a quarter of a century the magic ha

d faded; he became one of the trotting tide of clerical grey suits, rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and briefcases that flooded into the City each day to clerk for eight hours and return to the dormitory townships of the surrounding counties.

In the forest of the City he was, like his nickname, a friendly, harmless creature, grown with the passing years to fit a desk, a pleasant, round butterball of a man, just turned sixty, glasses ever on his nose for reading or looking at things closely, mild-mannered and polite to the secretaries who thought he was sweet and mothered him, and not at all accustomed to reading, let alone carrying on his person, dirty magazines. But that was what he did that morning. He crept away to the lavatories, slipped the bolt, and read every advertisement in New Circle.

It amazed him. Some of the adverts had accompanying pictures, mainly amateurish poses of what were evidently housewives in their underwear. Others had no picture, but a more explicit text, in some cases advertising services that made no sense, at least, not to Samuel Nutkin. But most he understood, and the bulk of the adverts from ladies expressed the hope of meeting generous professional gentlemen. He read it through, stuffed the magazine into the deepest folds of his briefcase and hurried back to his desk. That evening he managed to get the magazine back home to Edenbridge without being stopped and searched by the police, and hid it under the carpet by the fireplace. It would never do for Lettice to discover it.

Lettice was Mrs Nutkin. She was mainly confined to her bed, she claimed by severe arthritis and a weak heart, while Dr Bulstrode opined it was a severe dose of hypochondria. She was a frail and peaky woman, with a sharp nose and a querulous voice, and it had been many years since she had given any physical joy to Samuel Nutkin, out of bed or in it. But he was a loyal and trustworthy man, and he would have done anything, just anything, to avoid distressing her. Fortunately she never did housework because of her back, so she had no occasion to delve under the carpet by the fireplace.

Mr Nutkin spent three days absorbed in his private thoughts, which for the most part concerned a lady advertiser who, from the brief details she listed in her advert, was well above average height and possessed an ample figure.

On the third day, plucking up all his nerve, he sat down and wrote his reply to her advert. He did it on a piece of plain paper from the office and it was short and to the point. He said 'Dear Madam,' and went on to explain that he had seen her advert and would very much like to meet her.

There was a centrefold in the magazine that explained how adverts should be answered. Write your letter of reply and place it, together with a self-addressed and stamped envelope, in a plain envelope and seal. Write the number of the advert to which you are replying on the back of the envelope in pencil. Enclose this plain envelope, together with the forwarding fee, in a third envelope and mail it to the magazine's office in London. Mr Nutkin did all this, except that for the self-addressed envelope he used the name Henry Jones, c/o 27 Acacia Avenue, which was his real address.

For the next six days he was down on the hallway mat each morning the instant the mail arrived, and it was on the sixth that he spotted the envelope addressed to Henry Jones. He stuffed it into his pocket and went back upstairs to collect his wife's breakfast tray.

On the train to town that morning he slipped away to the toilet and opened the envelope with trembling fingers. The contents were his own letter, and written on the back in longhand was the reply. It said, 'Dear Henry, thank you for your reply to my ad. I'm sure we could have a lot of fun together. Why don't you ring me at —? Love, Sally.' The phone number was in Bays-water, in the West End of London.

There was nothing else in the envelope. Samuel Nutkin jotted the number on a piece of paper, stuffed it in his back pocket, and flushed the letter and envelope down the pan. When he returned to his seat there were butterflies in his stomach and he thought people would be staring, but old Fogarty had just worked out 15 across and no one looked up.

He rang the number at lunchtime from a call box in the nearest subway station. A husky woman's voice said, 'Hello?'

Mr Nutkin pushed the five-penny piece into the slot, cleared his throat and said, 'Er ... hello, is that Miss Sally?'

'That's right,' said the voice, 'and who is that?'