Chapter Eleven: The Dovecote at Monk’s Culvery
Patrick is on his way to Monk’s Culvery, via the secret priest tunnel. Presumably the Culver family were also Catholics in the “penal times”, allied with the Merricks, hence the tunnel and the monk reference in the estate’s name. And did you know that “culver” means dove (“Middle English from Old English culufre from Vulgar Latin columbra from Latin columbula, diminutive of columba, dove”)? So Maudie Culver comes from a long line of pigeon people.
Patrick feels “bold and gay” to be trespassing and possibly stealing pigeons, but “the cause was irreproachable”. Still, he can’t help hearing in his head Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s poem about Gallipoli:
“I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die:
I ask, and cannot answer,
If otherwise wish I.”
Just to make things even more dangerous, Patrick’s brought with him a throwing knife owned by his dodgy eighteenth-century cousin. Hmm, and we already know that a corpse (or possibly just a badly-wounded person) is going to appear soon on the storeroom floor…
Patrick very courageously climbs the high Dovecote wall (it’s a good thing Peter didn’t take on this task) and manages to break in through a tiny door. He climbs down to the floor and unfortunately falls asleep, which is not surprising given he was up before dawn. Also unfortunately, his watch has stopped working (“as it invariably did when he forgot to wind it”) so who knows how long he stays asleep. When he wakes, he doesn’t find any drugs, but does find a number of Scandaroons, who are most unhappy about a stranger messing around in their house.
Meanwhile, in the storeroom attached to the pigeon lofts, Jukie is talking with Espresso, the Thug’s “premier flutter propagator”, who is feeding a chick half-cooked egg from his own mouth, ugh. Espresso has “skin the colour of milky coffee” because his father, a pigeon expert, is from the Persian Gulf. Jukie mentions he’s grateful that Espresso’s Da put the Thuggery in contact with the Boss Man, allowing them all to make money from drug smuggling, but Espresso says that no, Jukie and the pigeons at Monk’s Culvery were the way his Da “eased in with the Boss Man” and the “big loot”. This is a disquieting surprise to Jukie. I should mention that Espresso appears to be hiding something from Jukie, but he does seem like a nice kid, as far as the Thugs go.
Then Skidskid arrives. He was supposed to be watching Patrick’s house but got spooked by mysteriously moving trees, “woody weirdies ’n they don’t shift while you’re watchin”. Jukie tells him to stay off the drugs. (Clearly none of them is familiar with Macbeth. Jukie, your reign is almost over.) Jukie also explains to the others how the Boss Man put two of his addicted thugs in the “boneyard” – just in case the threat of violence isn’t menacing enough in this chapter.
The Thuggery realise, via a nifty electronic landing-board indicator, that someone or something is disturbing the pigeons in the Dovecote. And as they go to investigate, they’re met by Kinky and friends with their own tale of woe. The Thuggery, thoroughly alarmed, run on towards the Dovecote. Watch out, Patrick!
Chapter Twelve: “Who Do Not Wish To Die”
Ominous chapter titling here. Jukie enters the Dovecote alone and Patrick does pretty well in hand-to-hand combat with him, even managing to grab the harness and drug capsule Jukie had just taken from a pigeon. Patrick bolts out the door and only gets caught because he trips and The Thuggery catch up. Jukie stops them stomping Patrick to death (“We need him conscious cause we need to quiz him”) and they march him back to the storeroom. Patrick does manage to conceal the drugs in his waistband and lie about this convincingly and the Thuggery waste some time trying to find the drug capsule in the dusk.
They also take Patrick’s knife off him and “Patrick thought it had probably not found itself in such congenial company since Cousin Ambrose was turned off at Tyburn”. (I only know the significance of Tyburn due to The Hanging Tree. Thanks, Peter!) Jukie starts to offer his captive a cigarette, but then decides Patrick is too square to smoke:
“You wouldn’t, do you, noddy-boy?”
“No,” agreed Patrick. In fact, he did, occasionally, depending on whom he was with. But this time he wasn’t sure he might not be being offered reefers.”
Ooh, Patrick, you’re so cool! “Depending on whom he was with”! Does he even have any friends, let alone smoking friends? He does know what a reefer is, maybe from eavesdropping at the coffee shop. Although I just looked it up and Reefer Madness came out in 1936, so I suppose the term had been around quite a while by the mid-sixties:
They also have a very disturbing conversation about Lawrie while waiting for Red Ted aka Rigid to return. Apparently Rigid is a ladies’ man:
“…mebbe he’ll give the chicklet a real live whirl. If she’s willin’ of course. ’N then again mebbe even if she’s not.”
They’re talking about raping a thirteen-year-old girl there. Patrick is horrified for a moment:
“Then it occurred to him that even Lawrie would hardly be fool enough to let herself be picked up by a Thug; and even if she hadn’t sense enough she’d still be too scared.”
Firstly, Lawrie was foolish enough and secondly, the Thugs don’t care about consent so it wouldn’t matter how scared she was, and thirdly, she’s a very naïve child, years under the age of consent. This is horrible to read, made bearable only because we know that Lawrie is safe.
Then Rigid returns with the news that Lawrie escaped him and is at the police station. When they ask Patrick what she could have told them, he “politely, insufferably” explains she would have showed them the pigeon, harness and “more truly than he supposed”, the drug capsule.
Panic among The Thuggery! Kinky leads the others in rebellion against Jukie. Jukie will stay to loose the birds the next morning; the others will flee, taking their share of the loot. But Kinky wants Maudie’s share as well, which Jukie refuses to give him, and Mr Luke reveals Kinky’s plan to overthrow Jukie as Top Boy. In the mayhem, Jukie flings Patrick’s knife at Kinky’s back and Kinky collapses. Patrick is the first to reach him:
“[Patrick’s] hand found an inexplicable thing to do. It went into his pocket and found his rosary … He put the rosary into Kinky’s hand and Kinky grasped it and his hand together … Patrick swallowed, crossed himself and stayed beside him, crouching.”
The others drag Kinky’s body into the storeroom, realise he’s dead and freak out. They rush off on their motorbikes, while Jukie takes the time to remove Kinky’s money from his wallet (“He can’t never use it”) and leads Patrick out to the garage to his own beloved motorbike. Sadly for Jukie, it’s been “most exquisitely taken apart”, then put back together, with the nuts thrown in the compost heap, according to a note the Thugs have left him. (What, they managed to disassemble and re-assemble a motorbike in five minutes?) So Jukie steals Maudie’s car and tells Patrick to get in.
AND PATRICK GETS IN THE CAR.
Why? Jukie doesn’t have time to coax or force him into the car. All Patrick has to do is walk away, then call the police or wait for them to arrive. But no, Patrick gets in the car with the drug-dealer he’s been trying to bring to justice, due to a “maverick sense of sympathy”. Or due to Antonia Forest wanting Patrick and Jukie to have a deep and meaningful conversation before Jukie’s inevitable demise.
Oh, it also turns out Espresso has stayed to let the pigeons free the next morning and he disobeys Jukie’s order to get in the car. So at least Espresso will be around when the police arrive and hopefully he’ll explain whatever secret he’s been concealing.
Next: The Flyaway