Going It Alone by Michael Innes Page B

deliberately designed as incommodious in a mediaeval dungeon. And all this was so heavy with conspiratorial suggestion that nobody would have thought of employing it, and thus all telephone conversations, however intimate, were cheerfully carried on coram populo . Through the open drawing-room door, therefore, Gilbert Averell heard snatches of this one. It was mostly a matter of Tim’s listening to what was being said to him. His responses, as well as being monosyllabic in the main, were couched, it seemed to his uncle, in tones of mounting indignation. Tim said ‘Good God, the swine!’ and ‘Utterly illegal, if you ask me’ and ‘Of course it would have to be by injunction, you bloody oaf!’ Several times (and at this Averell’s heart sank) he uttered the word ‘Fuzz’ preceded by an unprintable adjective (or at least one that Averell would not have put in print himself). ‘Of course I’ll come back at once!’ he was eventually heard to say. Then he banged down the receiver, emerged from the cupboard, and shouted unceremoniously through the house at large.
    ‘Hi!’ Tim shouted. ‘Anne – and you, what’s-your-name. Come here at once.’
    Thus rudely apostrophizing a young woman with the perfectly respectable name of Lou was on Tim Barcroft’s part an indication that he was exceedingly upset. So Averell was prepared for disaster as the boy stormed into the drawing-room again and his guests hurried across from the kitchen to join him.
    ‘That was Dave,’ Tim said more quietly. He had turned very pale, but it was impossible to tell whether this was from indignation or dismay. ‘He got away. It doesn’t sound as if any of the others did.’
    ‘What do you mean – got away? Got away from where?’ It was Anne who, round-eyed, asked the questions. She had perhaps never seen Tim like this before.
    ‘From the Uffington Street Squat – the one I was covering for En Vedette . It’s an outrage. The fuzz broke in on them and yanked them out – without so much as brandishing a warrant or a summons or an injunction from some dotty old judge or what-have-you. Yanked them out, and now they’re all inside.’
    ‘Inside?’ Lou said. ‘Inside where?’
    ‘Those bloody little white-washed cells, I suppose. With hulking great brutes standing round them and telling them to say this and that. It’s monstrous. It was a perfectly legal squat.’
    ‘Can squats be perfectly legal?’ Averell asked. He knew that he was on singularly unfamiliar ground.
    ‘The next thing to it,’ Tim said – this time a shade uncertainly. ‘I’ve got up the law. We’ve all got up the law. They could only be proceeded against individually and by name and as a matter of civil trespass and all that. But the police have thought up something quite fantastic. They’ve been told they’ll probably be charged with robbing a bank.’
    Very reasonably, this produced a moment’s stupefied silence. It had to be broken by Averell.
    ‘Friends of yours, Tim?’ he asked mildly.
    ‘Of course they’re friends of mine. Not that I’ve known many of them for long. Only since last week, most of them. But they certainly don’t rob banks.’
    ‘I suppose not.’ Averell wished he could feel confident about this. In circles frequented by his nephew it wasn’t inconceivable that there were young people who judged banks to be thoroughly iniquitous institutions, and bankers no better than robbers themselves. And he had no faith at all in the notion of a constabulary trumping up a charge of larceny against innocent young persons, however great the nuisance-value of their social or political persuasions. ‘About this Uffington Street,’ he said. ‘Is there a bank in it?’
    ‘Of course there is, Uncle Gilbert.’ Tim produced this reply in a tone of wholly unreasonable irritation. ‘Two doors down from the house. I passed it several times when I was mucking in a bit with the Uffington Street crowd. But it just isn’t –’
    ‘Does your friend