Shroud of Darkness

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “I don’t know, sir. I never have known,” rejoined James. “As you know, the high-ups were satisfied and I was told to leave it alone. If you want me to be perfectly honest, I was sorry I wasn’t allowed to go on a bit longer and get the issue cut and dried: it would have been more satisfactory for me and more satisfactory for you. The sight of me gives you a nasty taste in your mouth, I know that—all because we didn’t get things tidied up after you left Dijon.”

  “And now you’re trying to involve me in this story,” said Garstang bitterly, “all because a perfectly honest army doctor thought I could help a boy who’d lost his memory.”

  “Who was regaining his memory,” put in James. “You-yourself insisted on the importance of that point. Why?”

  “You can answer your own questions,” retorted Garstang. “Don’t expect me to help you.”

  “Very well,” went on James placidly. “As we see it—Macdonald and myself—the evidence seems to show that it was visual impressions which were the first to return when Greville’s memory came to the surface again. He recognised German script when he saw it: he recognised that house when he saw it. It seems reasonable to me. A small boy doesn’t read much, and words make less impression on him than things seen. So when he began to remember, it was through the medium of sight. He didn’t remember names or facts, but he began to recognise places. And if that’s so, he would be able to recognise faces.” He broke off: “Is there anything inherently improbable in that, sir?”

  Garstang shrugged his shoulders. “No. Not inherently. You can never tell how memory will behave, but the point you’ve made about a child retaining visual impressions is sound enough. But you can’t give a simple explanation of the behaviour of memory,” he added, speaking with a new emphasis. “Memory isn’t a concrete thing. There’s no seat of memory in the brain that’s known to surgeons or research workers. Memory is more like a chain reaction, or a wave movement: break a link in the chain, disrupt the wave—and it goes. And when it returns, it’s often activated by some apparently extraneous cause. You forget a name, a word, a face—and something can recall them, some association, not in itself relevant.” Again he broke off. “It’s no use trying to explain anything as complex as memory in a few words, but I’d hazard this opinion: a memory which has been disrupted or suppressed can be brought to the surface again by a combination of associations—sight, hearing, even taste and smell can be the associating factor.”

  “Thank you for that exposition, sir,” said James. “It’s very helpful, for both Macdonald and I are off our beat on this subject. Getting back to my idea of the boy remembering things he once saw. Twelve years ago,” he went on slowly: “to men of our age that’s nothing. I can remember the first time I saw you, sir, twelve years ago. You had got a bus ticket in your hands, and you folded it up, into a narrower and narrower strip. . . . To a boy of twenty-one or so, twelve years is a very long time, but I think he might remember faces—or a face which had made a great impression on him, once.”

  “Possibly—but what has all this to do with me?” asked Garstang.

  “You’ve been thinking all this over,” said James obstinately: “you have your own particular skill, which gives you greater accuracy in assessing what might have happened inside that boy’s mind. You have all the facts of the case that are known to us, and you’ve lived in Germany, first as a child, then, years later during the war, as a British agent, when you not only survived—against all the probabilities—but escaped. What I’m saying, in effect, is that you’re better qualified to help me in this business than anybody else could be . . . if you want to help us.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” asked Garstang.

  “I suppose I’m asking you to use your imagination, in the light of what you know,” said James slowly.

  Garstang lit another cigarette, and took his time before he replied. At length he said: “I should find it easier to debate possibilities if I weren’t aware that you believe I’m tied up in this somehow. You will be assessing everything that I say in the light of that belief, waiting for me to slip up. I remember you of old. First of all, let me give you a professional opinion about Richard Greville himself. He’s going to recover, and the probability is that his brain will be normal and his physique and nervous system undamaged. That’s a matter of physical probabilities, which his surgeon can assess. But from the point of view of my own science—the study of mind and all that mind implies—I think it’s very improbable he will remember anything that happened immediately prior to being knocked out.”

  “He’ll never be able to tell us who did it?” asked James.

  “That’s my opinion. Time will prove. But you—the police—aren’t only out to find who attacked Greville: it’s your job to find who murdered the other two men who were on that same train.”

  “Obviously—but they’re all tied up,” said James.

  Again Garstang fell silent, then he went on: “You asked me to use my imagination, to hazard a reconstruction in the light of my own specialised information, and your implication was that my knowledge of Germany should help me to do so. I suppose that you’re arguing that what one man could do, another man could do.”

  James made no reply, and Garstang went on: “As you know, I found a method which enabled me to live unsuspected in wartime Germany. I exchanged personalities, as it were, with another doctor shortly before the war. I, of course, was a qualified medical man before I studied psychiatry. I took over the running of a clinic to which another man had recently been appointed and I was accepted as that man. The only reason I ever came under suspicion was because suspected persons consulted me—as their medical adviser.”

  “Yes,” said James.

  “What I did in Germany a German could have done in England, if he had organised his ‘exchange’ well before the war,” went on Garstang. “Once he had been accepted, as I was accepted, there was no reason for suspicion to arise unless extraneous circumstances prompted suspicion. It would have been so much easier in England—no Gestapo, no paid informers, no everlasting fear of your next-door neighbour. And the odd thing is, that a man who pulled off a substitution like that could have gone on living in England. During the war, he couldn’t have got out. After the war, he wouldn’t have wanted to. What would he have been—a nazi agent?”

  “Yes,” said James.

  “Well, there’s the supposition,” said Garstang, “and don’t tell me that you and Macdonald didn’t think it out before I did. The boy’s memory began to come back in Germany. When he returned to England he saw—or remembered—a face or a name which was once familiar to him. And the owner of that face or name said: ‘It’s the end for one of us—and you rather than me.’ ”

  Garstang stubbed his cigarette out. “And what proof have I that mine wasn’t the face he recognised? I know that’s in your mind. And there’s this to it. I’ve seen Greville’s face. I was at the hospital when they changed his dressings. You haven’t seen him, but I can tell you his face has a lot of character in it: the bony structure, brows, jaw, cheekbones: the angle of his nose, the colour of his hair—they’re not only characters which would have been dominant in childhood, they’re probably characters inherited from his own father. Whoever studied Richard Greville’s face may well have seen the father in the son.”

  “That’s a very interesting point,” said James. “If the idea you have outlined has any substance—and I admit that Macdonald and I debated a similar possibility—it explains a lot. It was a case not only of recognising but being recognised.” He paused a moment, and then went on: “I’m very grateful to you for your patience, sir. I know how you feel about me. When I was checking up on you, I was only doing the job I was set to do. It was a job that had to be done and you knew it.”

  “Yes. I knew it: but after the life I’d lived for nearly two mortal years, it wasn’t easy to be philosophic in the face of suspicion . . . and it’s no easier now. I offered to go to Cologne because I believe I could find out who the boy is—b
ut no. I suppose you’ll go there, and if you make a mess of it you’ll learn nothing.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said James, and his voice sounded the voice of a very commonplace man, a bit diffident, a bit complacent. He went on in just the same tone: “Do you remember the name Dorward, sir? Does it convey anything to you?”

  Garstang sat perfectly still, then he said: “Can you tell me why you ask—give me an ‘associating factor,’ as it were?”

  “I just wondered if the name conveyed anything to you,” said James.

  Garstang reached out to a rack which held newspapers and found a copy of The Times. He handed it to James. “Dorward. Cartoffel. Freedman,” he quoted, “here in the Personal Column. I suppose you put this notice in. I read it, in the casual way that one does read that column, and the name Dorward seemed familiar. I looked through my files, to see if I had ever had a patient of that name—but I hadn’t. I may be quite mistaken, just imagining the name was familiar.”

  “Could you have treated a patient of that name when you were practising in Germany?” asked James.

  Garstang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily: it didn’t take any very acute powers of observation to note how strained and tired his face was.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I haven’t a clue. The only thing I can say is that I’ll think it over. If I think over the names I can remember in 1940 I may arrive at something. But it’s pretty improbable. It isn’t a German name—unless you’ve got it spelt wrong.”

  “No. It’s spelt all right,” said James. “Dorward was an American. He disappeared in 1941.”

  “Then I never knew him,” said Garstang.

  James got up. “Well, I won’t trouble you any more now, sir. You’re tired. I can see that.”

  “I’m dog-tired,” said the other, “but if I can rake up any recollection of where I heard the name ‘Dorward’ I’ll let you know.”

  And with that, James left him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I SWEAR THERE’S something, Jock. The name ‘Dorward’ shook him quite a bit,” said James.

  He was back at Scotland Yard again, reporting to Macdonald: the time was now nine o’clock in the evening. Reeves was pursuing his own researches in the hinterland of Paddington (probably entertaining “somebody’s dream of Arabian nights”) and Macdonald had been having a long telephone conversation with Ford worthy in Plymouth.

  “This case needs a mind like a radio receiving set, geared to pick up different wave lengths,” said Macdonald resignedly. “I’ve never met such a collection of extremes: we’ve got Reeves’s bunch of charmers, about as dirty a set of chislers as the dregs of civilisation can produce: a psychiatrist whose training and intelligence represent civilisation at its highest—we hope: a farmer from Devon who isn’t civilised at all if civilisation is an urban product, and an engineer who runs a well-established business in Reading for manufacturing miniature radio sets and deaf-aids.”

  “Don’t you feel disposed to cancel the farmer out, Jock? “Hie whole business is too involved for a country bumpkin to be at the bottom of it.”

  “I certainly can’t cancel him out merely because he looks the easiest guess,” said Macdonald. “He was on that train, he’d got a motive, and he spent the following day in London and didn’t get back home until late on the Wednesday evening. If you think farmers are simple, it’s only because you know nothing about farmers. And getting back to your comment about Garstang—the fact that he admitted the name ‘Dorward’ rang a bell counts in his favour, not the reverse. It would have been perfectly easy for him to say he’d never heard the name. Hullo . . . what is it this time?”

  He lifted the telephone and listened, and then said: “Send him up here.” To James he said: “This is a plus for your theory, a minus for Reeves and me. The Paddington police have brought along a young journalist who has something to report.”

  The lad who was brought into Macdonald’s room was a lively, alert-looking fellow of twenty-one or -two, his face showing plainly enough that this visit to Scotland Yard was an event in his young life.

  “Robert Forbes?” asked Macdonald. “Sit down and tell us what you’ve got to say in your own way, but facts only.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m junior reporter on the Cricklewood Courier—at least, I’m in training, really. I live near Slough and travel to and from Paddington every day. Last Monday evening I got to Paddington about half-past seven: I went there by the tube, and walked across to the indicators to see what train I could get home: they’d got a sort of skeleton service running on account of the fog and they were chalking up the trains that were due to go out, not far from the arrival indicator. I saw Dr. David Garstang by the arrival indicator. I recognised him because I heard him giving evidence in court last month: it was at the Marylebone Police Court, when a young woman named Merrill was charged with shoplifting. I noticed Dr. Garstang particularly then, and I’m quite sure I saw him at Paddington Station on Monday evening. It wasn’t only his face I recognised. He was wearing the same topcoat he wore when he gave evidence.”

  “Can you describe Dr. Garstang?” asked Macdonald.

  “Yes, sir. I’d say he’s five foot eleven, broad-shouldered, bony, but with a straight back. His hair was once black, but is going grey and thin on top. He has dark eyes and wears big glasses and I think he’s shortsighted. He’s got a long nose, rather hooked, and a nutcracker jaw, but somehow he looks kind. The overcoat was a sort of russet tweed, big and loose and not belted.”

  “And you’re prepared to swear that you saw Dr. Garstang at Paddington Station about half-past seven on last Monday evening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Now will you tell me why you mentioned this fact to the police: why, in your opinion, Dr. Garstang’s presence at Paddington Station was of any significance?”

  Forbes flushed a little, but he replied quite readily: “Well, sir, we’ve all been on our toes over these crimes in the Paddington area. News is our stock in trade, and we don’t wait for news to come to us: we go out after it, or we should soon get the push if we didn’t. We get what we can from the police—what they’re willing to tell us, that is, and then we go round asking—snooping, if you like—but it’s our job. Williams and I went to the mortuary, to see if we could get any facts, and it was at the mortuary we heard that Dr. Garstang was taking an interest, so to speak. He’d been there shortly before us. When I told the police sergeant I’d seen Dr. Garstang on Monday evening, I did so because I hoped the sergeant might be a bit more forthcoming to me—freer with the gen, if you see what I mean. I didn’t suggest Dr. Garstang was implicated in any way, sir.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” rejoined Macdonald. “Very well, Forbes. You’ve used your wits, and we’re grateful to you for behaving straightforwardly about this. This officer will take you down to the public relations officer, who may be able to give you some information—or may not. But he’ll give you a good mark, which may be of use to you some other time.”

  Forbes departed, flushed and gratified, and James said to Macdonald: “Well, there you are. If Garstang was all aboveboard, why didn’t he tell you to start with he’d been at Paddington Station?”

  “Well, I think I might guess the answer,” rejoined Macdonald, “but we’d better find out what Garstang himself says.”

  “He’ll deny it, of course,” said James morosely.

  Macdonald was just reaching for the telephone when an incoming call was indicated, and, having listened for a moment, Macdonald nodded to James to listen in on another receiver.

  “Chief Inspector Macdonald? Weldon here. I’m a bit ashamed of bothering you, but I admit to feeling a spot jittered over all this business. You may remember I told you I had a vague idea that Dr. Garstang’s face was familiar in some way, and my mind’s been nagging away at it ever since I left you. I think I’ve placed him, but I can’t be quite certain. The reason I’m ringing you is to ask if I could have a word with you later this evening. I’
ll come along to you, wherever you happen to be, if you’re available.”

  “Yes, of course,” rejoined Macdonald, “but I can save you the trouble of coming out—I’ll come along to you. Are you at home now?”

  “No. I’m not. I’m talking from a call box on the North Circular road. I’m on my way to see a chap who I think can check this idea of mine. And after I’ve seen him I’d rather come direct to have a word with you. It may be silly, but that’s how I feel about it. I’m not used to this cosh-and-come-again entertainment that’s going on.”

  “Look here, Mr. Weldon, if you feel apprehensive in any way, you’ve only got to tell me the number of the call box you’re speaking from and I’ll have a police car there in a matter of minutes.”

  “Good Lord, no. I don’t mean that at all. I’m as right as rain in these parts. It’s just that I’ve got a thing about going home before I’ve told you the result of my evening’s researches.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more sensible if you told me what’s in your mind now, Mr. Weldon?”

  “No. It just wouldn’t be fair. I’m only guessing, and I’m not going to say anything damaging about a man without a flicker of real evidence to bear me out. It’s easier to say things than to unsay them. Just let me know where you will be in an hour’s time and I’ll put any ideas I’ve got at your disposal and you can sort them out. Don’t imagine I’m the sort of hero who goes courting trouble. I’m not. I prefer to avoid trouble.”

  “Then why not tell me why it is that you’ve begun to get apprehensive in the last hour or so, Mr. Weldon: you didn’t suggest anything of the kind when I saw you earlier this evening.”

  “I know I didn’t, and I’m probably being a ninny to be worrying you now—but I told you I got an idea that I want to look into. And rather an odd thing happened . . . I say, are you there? This phone is a bit haywire.”

  “Yes. I’m here: the line isn’t good, but I can hear you all right.”