The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  “What telegram? No, I haven’t.” He took Crawley’s letter out of his pocket and tore it into small pieces. Then he walked to the lavatory, put the pieces in the pan and pulled the chain. Michael, who had followed him, stood in admiration.

  “Do you know, I’ve often heard about people doing that, but I’ve never seen it done.” He went back to his bacon and eggs and said reflectively, “But still, you can always send the telegram.”

  42

  When the case was over Magnus Newton posed, beaming, for photographs, said thank you to Toby Bander, exchanged congratulations with Charles Earl, and went back as quickly as he could to Hampton Court. He greeted his wife by flapping his arms and crowing like a cock, and this did not surprise her because it was his custom when particularly elated. They ate a very simple meal—an omelette and salad, with a bottle of Pol Roget—and then he talked about the case until his wife fell asleep.

  Eustace Hardy travelled back to London by the same train, but not in the same carriage. He felt very little emotion about Leslie Gardner’s acquittal, but found Newton brash, vulgar, and generally antipathetic. Hardy spent the evening in the club, where nobody talked to him about the case. He played three rubbers of bridge, which he considered the only card game worthy of serious intellectual concentration, and then read Macaulay in bed.

  Twicker and Norman were also on the train. They sat opposite each other, but hardly spoke. On the following morning Twicker’s letter of resignation was on the A.C.’s desk. Acceptance of the resignation at that time would have been an acknowledgment that the case had been badly handled. The A.C. sent for Twicker, talked to him for half an hour, and tore up the letter. Twicker was never again trusted with an investigation of any importance. Twelve months later he wrote another letter of resignation, and this time it was accepted.

  Nothing happened to Norman, beyond a verbal barrage from which he emerged much shaken. In such matters the sins of sergeants are often visited upon superintendents, and within a few months Norman was as cockily ebullient as ever. On the rare occasions when he saw Twicker he was greeted with a nod. The two men never worked together again.

  When he left his house George Gardner went round to his closest political associate, a man named Carpenter, and told him that he had changed his mind about giving up politics and leaving the district. He was going to stay and fight it out. Gardner’s lack of teeth made the militancy of his speech sound comic, but he did not seem comic to Carpenter. The two men sat talking together until after three o’clock in the morning.

  Garney went back to his cell. His warders saw no diminution of the hard indifferent courage he had shown during his trial.

  Jill Gardner tried to talk to her brother, and made a pot of tea and some sandwiches. He would neither eat nor drink, nor would he speak to her. At nine o’clock he went up to his room. Half an hour later she went to bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.

  Leslie Gardner did not sleep. Perhaps he spent the time until midnight thinking about Garney, or perhaps he was awaiting his father’s return. It must have been at about midnight, the doctor said afterwards, that he knotted his braces, tied them to the hook on the back of his bedroom door, stood on a chair, put his head through the noose, pulled it tight, and kicked away the chair. George Gardner found him when he came home at half-past three, and saw a light on in his son’s room.

  43

  Fairfield heard the news on his hotel bedroom radio at nine o’clock on the following morning, while he was shaving. His hand was shaking very badly, and he felt even worse than he usually felt at this time of day. He cut himself, staunched the bleeding, finished shaving, and then telephoned Crawley at his home. By ten-thirty he and Sally Banstead and the photographer were on their way back to London. At the office Fairfield asked for and obtained three days’ leave. He went on a forty-eight-hour drinking jag that ended in a fight with a sailor. In the fight he suffered a black eye and his glasses were broken. He spent a day on soda water and biscuits and turned up in the office at the end of his leave with a black patch over the eye and wearing a spare pair of glasses, but otherwise little the worse for wear.

  Crawley telephoned the news to Lord Brackman.

  “I see.” Lord Brackman’s breathing sounded more than usually thick, there was the preliminary throat-clearing, and then one word. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. And it’s better not to guess. I’ve told Frank and Sally to come back.”

  Such an acknowledgment by Crawley that he had assumed authority was so rare that it gave Lord Brackman pause. “Yes,” he said after a while. “Kill it, Edgar. Kill it.”

  “We shall have to say something about the suicide.”

  “A paragraph.” Another pause. “Had Fairfield got any of the story?”

  “Not yet. Things were awkward, from what I gather. There were family complications.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more.” The thick voice choked up, and then began to whine. “I don’t want to argue about this.”

  Crawley said crisply, “One more thing. We were going to pay for the story. But there’s no story. I don’t feel that there’s any need—”

  “I leave it to you, I’ve got every faith in you. No unpleasantness, that’s the thing. No argument. And, Edgar.”

  “Yes, Brack?”

  “Send a wreath.”

  Hugh heard the news from Clare when he went into the office at about half-past ten. She handed him the message as it had come through on the tape, without saying anything. Then she said, “Lane’s out. But somebody will have to handle it. I don’t suppose you want to do it, Hugh. If I were you—”

  He did not wait for the end of the sentence. It was raining heavily out of a leaden sky as he walked down Peter Street. The blinds of the house were drawn, but Jill saw him, and opened the door. She took him into the kitchen. She was composed, dry-eyed.

  “This really is the end of it,” she said. “Poor Leslie.”

  “Poor Leslie.”

  Feet sounded on the stairs. Before he had time to ask how her father had taken it, George Gardner appeared in the doorway. He looked tired but cheerful. “Hallo, young Hugh. Is there a pot of tea, Jill?”

  “I’ve got the kettle on.” She was at the gas cooker and now, without turning, she said, “Dad’s staying on.”

  “You’ve got to fight it out.” Gardner nodded at Hugh. “No use running away from things. I settled that last night, talking to Charlie Carpenter. That was before I came back and found him. That was his trouble, running away from things.”

  “Leslie?”

  “If we’d never let those vultures of the Press get at him, he’d have been all right. That was the biggest mistake I ever made. Coming here last night the way they did. The boy didn’t know what he was saying. I reckon they drove him to it.” So that was to be the way of it, Hugh thought incredulously, like Fairfield last night Gardner was to maintain that Leslie’s words had not borne their plain and obvious meaning. “He was a victim,” Gardner said now in a voice that might have been impressive but for its tooth-lacking lisp, “a victim of the capitalist Press.”

  The kettle shrieked. Jill poured water in the pot. “Dad’s staying on, but I’m going.”

  Hugh stared at her. “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Out of Peter Street. And out of my job. It’s now or never. I know what I’m like.”

  Gardner said cheerfully, “Charlie Carpenter’s got a spare room that would just about suit me. He was talking about it last night as a matter of fact. And I shouldn’t want to stay on after—” He nodded upwards. He couldn’t have endured his son alive, Hugh thought, but he’s a useful symbol now that he’s dead. They drank the tea, and Gardner looked at his watch. “I think I’ll go round and have a word with Charlie now. You’ll be all right?” he said to Jill.

  “Of course.”

  “I won’t be more than half an hour.”

&nbs
p; When the door had closed he said, “Jill?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a letter from the Banner. An invitation to lunch.”

  “Are you going?”

  “No. But I’m not staying at the Gazette either.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think two temporarily unemployed people ought to get married?”

  “Not when one of them is a meat and two veg girl.”

  “But you’re not. If you were you’d be staying here, staying in your job.”

  “I can’t talk about it. Not in this house.”

  “Then let’s go for a walk. You’d better put on your raincoat. It’s pouring.”

  They went out into the city.

  THE END

  The Tigers of Subtopia

  It began with the telephone call from Miriam. “Bradley,” she said, “there are some boys outside.”

  Bradley Fawcett recognised in his wife’s voice the note of hysteria that was occasionally discernible nowadays. It’s the menopause, Dr. Brownlow had said, you must be patient with her. So now his voice took on a consciously patient tone, a talking-to-Miriam tone it might have been called, although he did not think of it in that way.

  “Friends of Paul’s, you mean?”

  “No. Oh, no. Beastly boys. Louts. They took his sweets.”

  “Took his sweets,” Brad echoed stupidly. He stared at the contract on the desk in front of him.

  “They asked him for them and he gave them one or two, and then they knocked them out of his hand.” She ended on a rising note.

  Had she telephoned the office simply to tell him this? Patiently he said, “Calm down now, Miriam. Is Paul upset?”

  “No, he’s—but they’re outside, you see, they’re still outside.” There was a sound that could have been interpreted as a kind of tinkling crack and then he heard her shriek, “They’ve broken the glass!”

  “What glass?”

  “The living room—our beautiful living-room window.”

  Brad put down the telephone a couple of minutes later, feeling hot and angry. He had not rung the police because they would have come round and talked to Miriam, and he knew that would upset her. The window itself was not important, although he would have to put in a large and expensive sheet of plate glass, but this was not the first trouble they had had with hooligans in The Oasis.

  Geoff Cooper’s garage wall had been daubed one night with filthy phrases, and on another occasion the flowers in the middle of one of the green areas had been uprooted and strewn around as though by some great animal; on a third occasion the sandpit in the children’s playground had been filled with bits of broken glass, and one little boy had cut his foot quite badly.

  It was the senselessness of such acts that irritated Brad, as he said to his companions in the train, on the way back from the city to Dunkerley Green. The journey was a short one, no more than twenty minutes, but there were four of them who always made it together. The trains they caught—the 9:12 in the morning and the 6:18 at night—were never crowded, and they preferred the relaxation of sitting in the train to the tension of driving through the traffic.

  Geoff Cooper, Peter Stone, and Porky Leighton all lived in The Oasis, and they had other things in common. Cooper was an accountant, Stone ran a travel agency, Porky Leighton was in business as a builder’s merchant, and Brad himself was one of the directors of an engineering firm. They all dressed rather similarly for going into the city, in suits of discreet pinstripe or of plain clerical grey. Porky, who had been a rugger international in his youth, wore a striped tie, but the neckwear of the other three was sober.

  They all thought of themselves as professional men, and they all appreciated the civilised amenities of life in The Oasis. Brad, who had passed the age of fifty, was the oldest of them by a decade. He liked to feel that they looked to him for counsel, that he was the elder statesman of their little group. He felt the faintest twinge of annoyance that it should have been Geoff Cooper who mentioned the idea of a Residents’ Committee. The others took it up so enthusiastically that it seemed incumbent on him to express doubts.

  “Forgive me for saying it, Geoff, but just how would it help?”

  “Look, Brad, let’s start from the point that we’re not going to put up with this sort of thing any longer. Right?” That was Porky. He wiped his red face with a handkerchief, for it was hot in the carriage. “And then let’s go on to say that the police can’t do a damned thing to help us.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Brad was never at ease with Porky. It seemed to him that there was an unwelcome undercurrent of mockery in the man-to-man straightforwardness with which Porky spoke to him.

  “You know what the police were like when Geoff had that trouble with his garage wall.”

  “Told me that if I could say who’d done it they would take action.” Geoff Cooper snorted. “A lot of use that was.”

  “The fact is, The Oasis is a private estate and, let’s face it, the police don’t mind too much what happens. If you want something done, do it yourself, that’s my motto.” That was Porky again.

  “Half the trouble is caused by television,” Peter Stone said in his thin fluting voice. “There are programmes about them every night, these young toughs. They get puffed up, think they’re important. I saw one this week—do you know what it was called? The Tigers of Youth.”

  Geoff snorted again. Porky commented. “You can tame tigers.”

  “Nevertheless,” Brad said. It was a phrase he often used when he wanted to avoid committing himself.

  “Are you against it? A Committee, I mean,” Geoff asked.

  “I believe there must be some other way of dealing with the problem. I feel sure it would be a good idea to sleep on it.”

  Did he catch an ironic glance from Porky to the others? He could not be sure. The train drew into Dunkerley Green. Five minutes’ walk, and they had reached The Oasis.

  There were gates at the entrance to the estate, and a sign asking drivers to be careful because children might be playing. There were green strips in front of the houses, and these strips were protected by stone bollards with chains between them. The houses were set back behind small front lawns, and each house had a rear garden. And although the houses were all of the same basic construction, with integral garages and a large through room that went from front to back, with a picture window at each end, there were delightful minor differences—like the basement garden room in Brad’s house, which in Geoff’s house was a small laundry room, and in Porky’s had been laid out as a downstairs kitchen.

  Brad’s cousin, an architect from London, had once burst into a guffaw when he walked round the estate and saw the bollards and chains. “Subtopia in Excelsis,” he had said, but Brad didn’t really mind. If this was Subtopia, as he said to Miriam afterwards, then Subtopia was one of the best places in England to live.

  He had expected to be furiously angry when he saw the broken window, but in fact the hole was so small, the gesture of throwing a stone seemed so pathetic, that he felt nothing at all. When he got indoors, Miriam was concerned to justify her telephone call. She knew that he did not like her to phone him at the office.

  “I told them to go away and they just stood there, just stood laughing at me.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Three.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “The one in the middle was big. They called him John. He was the leader.”

  “But what did they—”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “They all looked the same—you know those ghastly clothes they wear, tight trousers and pointed shoes. I didn’t go near them. I called out that I was going to phone the police, and then I came in and spoke to you. Why should they do such a thing, Bradley, that’s what I don’t understand.”


  She was the only person who called him by his full Christian name, and he had sometimes thought that it typified the nature of their relationship, without knowing quite what that meant. It always seemed, too, that he talked rather more pontifically than usual in Miriam’s presence, as though she expected it of him.

  “It’s a natural youthful impulse to defy authority,” he said now. “And when you told them you were going to call the police—why, then they threw the stone.”

  She began to cry. It did not stop her talking. “You’re making it sound as if I were in the wrong. But I did nothing, nothing!”

  “Of course you’re not in the wrong. I’m just explaining.”

  “What harm have we ever done to them?”

  “No harm. It’s just that you may find it easier if you try to understand them.”

  “Well, I can’t. And I don’t want to understand.” She paused, and said something that astonished him. “Paul knows them. They’re his friends.”

  That was not strictly true, as he discovered when he talked to Paul. They sat in the boy’s bedroom, which was full of ingenious space-saving devices, like a shelf which swung out to become a table top. Paul was sitting at this now, doing school work. He seemed to think the whole thing was a fuss about nothing.

  “Honestly, Dad, nothing would have happened. We were playing around and Fatty knocked the sweets out of my hand, and it just so happened that Mum had come to the door and saw it. You know what she’s like—she let fly.”

  “Fatty? You know them?”

  “Well, they come and play sometimes down on the common, and they let us play with them.”

  The common was a piece of waste ground nearby, on which Paul sometimes played football and cricket. There was no provision in The Oasis for any kind of ball game.

  “Are they friends of yours?”

  Paul considered this. He was a handsome boy, rather small for his thirteen years, compact in body and curiously self-contained. At least, Brad thought it was curious; he was intermittently worried by the fact that he could not be sure what Paul was thinking.