The Silent Speaker

by Noel Streatfeild

  Field took the sheaf of paper which held his six red roses and was moving, full of purpose, towards St. John’s Wood when Mrs. Wragge touched his arm.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Field, but could you spare me a minute?”

  Field stopped. He did not want to be hindered but he was a kind man.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Wragge. What can I do for you?”

  Mrs. Wragge took a deep breath.

  “I suppose properly I did ought to tell Mrs. Simpson, but I don’t know whether I did or whether I didn’t and that’s a fact.”

  “What is your trouble to do with?”

  Mrs. Wragge was surprised at his question.

  “Mrs. Blair of course, I mean why she done what she did.”

  Field realised a duty when he saw it. He steered Mrs. Wragge out of the way of hurrying shoppers.

  “You know something?”

  “Not to say know but it could be to do with. I told Mrs. Simpson how my sister lives in Dunkirk Buildings, Rotherhithe, and that was how I come to see Mrs. Blair. She visited down that way.”

  “Did she?” said Field in a voice which gave nothing away.

  “Mrs. Simpson didn’t ask where Mrs. Blair went and I never told her, seeing it didn’t matter. But now I’m not sure. You see, the woman they say she visited was found drowned. Mrs. Manning her name was.”

  Field heard again the slurred voice singing “Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us” and the woman saying “Give you the creeps, don’t it, might be Mrs. Manning back,” and the moustached man answering “It can’t be Mrs. Manning, they buried her Tuesday.”

  “How do you think this woman could be mixed up with Madam?”

  “She was a shocking drunk by all accounts, but not far off Mrs. Blair’s age. You hear of such funny things, Mr. Field, I was wondering if she could have been a sister, very ladylike way of talking they said she had.”

  Field felt distaste, such things did happen but not to his families.

  “I think it’s more likely Madam visited to help the poor woman.”

  “It could be,” Mrs. Wragge agreed, “but what I was wondering was, did I ought to tell anyone about Mrs. Manning, I mean poor Mr. Blair’s fretting?”

  Field did not need time to answer that question.

  “My advice is ‘no,’ Mrs. Wragge. I’d say forget it. First place, if there was something like that in the family Mr. Blair would know, and secondly, it wouldn’t be a sister, I mean you don’t do what Madam did on account of a sister or brother, do you?”

  Mrs. Wragge thought of her sister in Dunkirk Buildings and mentally threw Mrs. Manning back into the river. She chuckled.

  “Now you put it that way you’re too right, Mr. Field. I can’t see myself doing what Mrs. Blair done any road, but I do know, if I was drove to it whoever else it was it wouldn’t be my sister what did the driving.”

  Field nodded.

  “So I suggest you forget about Mrs. Manning. At the best you could be dragging a skeleton out of the cupboard and you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

  Mrs. Wragge shifted her shopping bag to her other hand.

  “It’s forgotten already and thank you for your help, Mr. Field.”

  Field set off again to St. John’s Wood. He sniffed his roses. Already he could see the tea laid on the kitchen table. He pushed aside his talk with Mrs. Wragge and instead focused on what he was going to say. “We’ve known each other a long time, Mrs. S., and they say trouble draws you together. I was wondering if you would honour me by becoming Mrs. Field . . .”

  * * *

  The next morning the weather was kind. The sun shone and the air was full of the ripe walnut smell of decaying leaves. The hedges were draped with old man’s beard and gay with hip berries. Even Selina’s spirits rose slightly.

  “I’m a country woman,” she told Miss Osborne when she came down to breakfast. “A day like this makes me shudder at the thought of London.”

  “Then don’t go back until this evening,” Miss Osborne suggested. “Go for a long walk, the country is lovely round here. I would send Verily with you but I think you would rather be alone.”

  “Was I right in thinking there’d be no more sleep-walking?”

  “You were, bless you, Matron reports Verily slept solidly. I’ll give her one more night in the sickroom then she can rejoin her friends.”

  Because of what was involved Selina had been forced to be evasive about her talk with Verily.

  “I’m pretty confident that the trouble is over.” She took the cup of coffee Miss Osborne offered her. “I wish I could tell you more but other people are involved.”

  Miss Osborne dismissed that by changing the subject.

  “When are you going back to Ireland?”

  The glory of the morning was blotted out as the whole tragic business swept into the room. Selina’s face showed she was distressed.

  “I don’t know. I want to see Tim before I go—and of course I wouldn’t go if there was anything I could do to help.”

  Miss Osborne was not one to probe.

  “You take that walk,” she advised. “I always find there’s nothing like a long walk for sorting out plans.”

  So it was evening before Selina, loaded with berries she had picked on her walk, arrived back at her hotel. Long before her taxi reached it she was leaning forward as if to urge it along. Would there be a note or a message? She knew she was behaving like a fool. Her walk had, as Miss Osborne had prophesied, been good for thinking, and what dreary thinking it was. Thoughts ran to and fro in her head scrambling against the truth, but in the end she had faced it. After what Verily had said, even if Tom should make a move to see her, there could be no hope of happiness. The ghastly possibility that Helen had known they loved each other would prevent any chance of that.

  But accepting something is hopeless does not, Selina discovered, prevent hope quickening. Trying not to look too eager she came up to the hotel desk. The head porter was still on duty. He handed her a telephone message. Selina moved away to read the message for she knew she had a naked face. It was from Miriam. Lady Worn, it said, had rung three times. Would she ring her as soon as she got in.

  Selina went up to her room and threw the message about Miriam on to the dressing-table.

  “I don’t know what to say if I do ring her,” she thought. “She’ll go on and on but I can’t tell her what Verily said to Helen about me. I’m going home to Ireland and I suppose I shall never come back. They’ll talk about me but soon they’ll stop, just as soon they’ll even stop wondering about Helen. I wish I could go to-morrow, it’s stupid and humiliating hanging on here. But I must see Tim. I can’t let him think I let him down.” She looked with loathing at her large suitcase. If only she could press a button and find herself in Ireland. The effort of getting there, ordering a cabin on the boat to Cork, buying tickets, packing, seemed beyond her strength. Curious how energy-sapping unhappiness was.

  The telephone rang. Selina hesitated before answering it, then submissively she picked up the receiver. Miriam would keep on until she did answer and anyway they knew in the hall that she was in. To her surprise it was Edward.

  “I’m in the hall, Selina. Could you come down and have a drink?”

  Though she despised herself for it again hope quickened in Selina. Edward was seeing Tom, it was impossible not to think he might have been sent with a message.

  Selina led Edward into the little writing-room, which happened to be empty. Edward was interested to notice that Tom had been a true recorder, for Selina said none of the usual things—“How do you do?” or “How are you?” but went straight to the matter in hand.

  “We’ll try the little drawing-room. It’s often empty. What do you want to drink?”

  “Nothing for the moment. Will the night porter be on?”

  Selina looked at her watch.

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  “Do you know him?”

  Did she know him! The kindness of the night porter was one of the few things about the last ten days Selina cared to remember.

  “Yes, he was on duty when Tom telephoned to say what had happened. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  Edward sat on one of the writing tables.

  “His name is Dunkel.”

  “I know.”

  “I want you to send for him.”

  There was a suppressed excitement about Edward that conveyed itself to Selina.

  “Why?”

  Edward got up and caught hold of her hands.

  “You’ve had a bad time, my dear, but I think it may be over. I ran a war-time friend of Helen’s to ground and from her learnt of a warden who seemed to have played an important part in Helen’s life. Everything points to something pretty drastic having happened to her during the war, and I think this warden was mixed up in it. That warden is now your night porter.”

  “Dunkel! How did you find that out?”

  “Quite simply really. Through a man called Pringle. He was the porter at The Edelweiss and a friend of Dunkel’s. Pringle is in St. Thomas’s hospital. I went to see him tonight and came straight on here. I could hardly believe him when he told me where Dunkel was working now, it seemed such an odd twist of fate that he should be in your hotel.”

  Selina drew her hands away from Edward’s, crossed the room and rang the bell.

  “I can’t think you’re right, because Dunkel knew about Helen. I mean that I knew her. All the hotel staff knew. I’m sure he’d have said so if he knew her too.”

  Edward sat down in an armchair.

  “You forget that she was Helen Blair when she died—if he knew her it would have been as Helen Lomax.”

  The door opened and the night porter came in. He gave Selina a look which was compounded half of deference and half of friendship.

  “Yes, madam?”

  Edward stared at the man. Could he possibly, even when young and allowing for the war doing odd things to people, have been the father of a child of Helen’s?

  Before Selina could answer he said:

  “If you kept the door open could you hear if you were wanted for we’ve some questions we want to ask you?”

  Dunkel was trained not to show surprise.

  “I expect so, sir.” Then he looked at Selina. “What were you wanting to know, madam?”

  Edward believed, when possible, in winding by a quick blow those from whom he wanted information.

  “You were a friend during the war of a Miss Helen Lomax?”

  Dunkel was a frail-looking man with the sorrowful face of a bloodhound. He was not winded, he was reproving.

  “Not a friend, sir, we met in the course of our war service.”

  Edward was not accepting that.

  “You knew her well enough to call at her home.”

  Dunkel might be frail but he did not lack spirit. He turned to Selina.

  “I am sorry to seem disobliging, madam, but nobody has the right to question me, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll be about my duties. Indeed, there’s a bell now.”

  Selina turned to Edward.

  “What will you have to drink?”

  “A large whisky.”

  “Water or soda, sir?” Dunkel asked.

  “Soda,” said Edward. Then as the door closed behind the man he raised his eyebrows at Selina. “Stubborn type.”

  “Not really, he’s an angel. You’re making him nervous. If you’ll tell me what you want to know I’ll ask him. I think he’ll answer me.”

  Edward lit a cigarette.

  “It’s not easy, the man’s probably married now and got a family.”

  Selina, wretched though she was, had not entirely lost her sense of humour. She gave a rather hysterical giggle.

  “You’re not thinking Helen and Dunkel . . . oh no! It’s impossible.”

  “If you were in my job you’d know nothing is impossible, and Dunkel may have looked pretty dashing in his warden’s outfit.”

  Selina was still giggling.

  “But why choose him?”

  “He’s the only possible. I’ve not been able to run a child to earth but my theory is that Helen had one and it was that child, or rather reading of what became of that child, that caused her to turn on the gas.”

  Selina lost all wish to giggle.

  “Miriam Worn told me about the News of the World, but she said there were so many cases mentioned it was impossible to follow them all up.”

  Edward wondered for whose cause Miriam was studying the News of the World.

  “She was right. I believed I could do it because I thought I knew which pages Helen had read. But I must have been wrong. There were several people in the news I thought possible. A girl called Elizabeth Piltch for one, whose mother had deserted her at birth, but the man I sent to enquire learnt that the mother was coloured. There were a gang of young hooligans who stole television sets but all had mothers. I even chased up a drunk parson but he had a doting mother. There was a horror who put out cats’ eyes but his mother is alive in an asylum. I even tracked down a runaway from a foster home found starving on Dartmoor but his mother died of tuberculosis when the boy was three.”

  “Why are you so certain it was a child?”

  Edward raised both hands.

  “It could have been some man, of course. I had that fellow Andy Digue checked up, he ran off with an heiress. There was a possible there. We had to drop our interest in him like a blazing firework for there was another woman involved who proved to be the wife of an ambassador.”

  Selina held up a finger to show she could hear Dunkel coming back.

  “Tell him who Helen was,” she whispered, “I mean her name when she died.”

  Dunkel came in with the whisky on a tray. He served Edward with no sign of rancour.

  “Miss Grierson feels,” Edward said, “that it would help if I explained that your Miss Lomax married. She became Mrs. Blair, that Helen Blair about whose suicide you already know.”

  This time Edward had well and truly winded Dunkel. He turned a grey colour and almost dropped his tray. He spoke under his breath.

  “Oh no! I never thought it would come to that. She must have read it in the paper. Oh, poor lady!”

  Selina dared not hope too much but her longing for it was in her voice.

  “If you could tell us all you know it would be a great help. You see, Mr. Blair blames himself.”

  That pulled Dunkel together.

  “He shouldn’t do that. How was he to know?”

  Edward longed to get to the bottom of the Blair affair, but he did not think even so it was wise of Selina to tell a hall porter family details.

  “It’s shock of course. Mr. Blair was a wonderful husband.”

  But Edward might not have spoken for the other two appeared not to have heard him.

  “I’ll be glad to tell you, madam,” said Dunkel. “I never would have when Miss Lomax—Mrs. Blair I should say—was alive, seeing she took it so badly, but now it can’t do any harm.” He crossed the room and shut the door.

  “What about bells?” Selina asked.

  “Let them ring.” Dunkel leant against the door. “I’ve often wished I could tell someone about this, madam. It was back in 1941. She drove an ambulance and I was a warden.”

  “Is that where you met?” Edward asked.

  “That’s right, we called her amongst ourselves the Fire-fly. You see she was little but a proper firebrand. Back in ’40 we used to call out ambulances to all incidents, and often it turned out there wasn’t any for the hospital, they were all for the mortuary. None of the ambulance girls liked taking dead bodies, they said it wasn’t what they were there for, which it wasn’t, and anyway it
was often wasting their time for they’d get to a mortuary only to find it locked.”

  Edward tried not to sound impatient.

  “Very interesting, but how did this further your acquaintance with Mrs. Blair?”

  Dunkel, once started, could not be put off.

  “I’m coming to that, sir. Miss Lomax wasn’t one to grumble and do nothing. She calls a meeting and the next thing we knew was no ambulance driver was to take any but hospital patients. That’s how we come to know her well; ‘here comes Fire-fly’ the boys would say.”

  Edward was beginning to see the Helen with whom Celia had been at school.

  “A real leader.”

  Dunkel shook his head.

  “I don’t think she was anything special, in the ambulance service just one of the drivers, but the sort that just naturally took the lead, at least we’d got in the way of thinking her special. That was how it happened.”

  Selina and Edward, hanging on his words, spoke together.

  “What happened?”

  There was a pause during which Dunkel pulled an oft-recalled picture out of his memory and brought it into the room.

  “It was the end of those first heavy raids on London. Terrible night it was, everything was dropping on us. I’m called out to a block of flats that had a direct hit. Luckily most were in the shelter, but there was one flat had a soldier alone in it. The whole place was toppling over, if you touched one wall another fell. He was in the kitchen trapped, we found after, the stove had fallen on his foot. He didn’t know where he was, poor fellow, so he was thrashing about and every minute we were expecting he’d bring what was left of the floor above down on to him. The only chance for him was a shot of morphia but there was no way to get it to him, leastways no way the doctor or one of us could get in for we were too big, for the only way in was through a small hole in the wall. Then I saw Miss Lomax drive up. I don’t know what came over me to think she’d do it—except she was so thin she could have got down a rabbit hole and she was the sort you’d expect it of. I called to the doctor ‘that driver will go in for us.’ The other driver was parking the ambulance. Miss Lomax was going to report they had arrived when I brought the doctor up and told her what was wanted. It was queer that, it was as if, as I showed her, she fell to pieces. She took a look at the hole and what was left of the flat. Then she screeched out ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ and ran off into the black-out.”