After an exasperating delay I picked up a taxi and told the driver to take me to Warminster. As we went along, I let him know that I was a Bristol surveyor and wanted to inspect a small parcel of agricultural land just outside the village. I stopped him in the middle of nowhere and then had to sneak half-way round Warminster Sleight before I could climb the knoll without being seen. By the grace of God my wallet was still in the woodpecker hole. So back again, running, to the taxi. It was ten past twelve, and the search for me in the hospital would be hotting up.
I directed my taximan to Glastonbury, but not through Wells as I wanted to see the country. It took him less than quarter of an hour. I think he wanted his lunch. It was fair to assume that the hospital orderlies would now be combing the lavatories, the basement and the gardens, and that the police would have been warned. But since nobody could know what I was wearing until the current operation was over the description of me would, with luck, be vague and might even mention that I had escaped in pyjamas.
Leaving the taxi in the centre of the town and telling the driver to wait for me, I dashed into a deserted alley and dealt with my smart, black hat. Having served to hide my face and impress the world with my professional standing, it had now become an embarrassing property. I could not be tracked by the anaesthetist’s dark suit, which was just a dark suit, but that hat would give me away all over the West Country if I continued to wear it. There was nowhere I could leave it with any certainty that it would not be found, so I flattened it and stuffed it half way down the seat of the anaesthetist’s trousers.
Then, hatless as I normally was, I went round a corner and into the Somerset and Dorset Bank. I kept the wounded side of my neck away from the counter and asked the clerk to tell the Manager that Mr Yarrow wanted to see him. I was shown into his office about as quickly as a stranger has ever been received in any bank, and he nervously slammed his door behind me.
‘I wonder if you would be good enough to cash me a cheque for thirty pounds,’ I said.
‘You really …? You really …?’ he stammered.
Naturally he knew nothing of my adventures after leaving the barn. I should love to learn why he thought I had called on him. Blackmail, probably.
‘Yes, really. Thirty in pound notes, please. After all, I am personally known to you.’
I wrote out a cheque, and he rang for his clerk to get the money. The man came in on the wrong side of me. I kept my head well down, undoing and doing up a shoe lace.
‘You are still thinking of settling here?’ the Manager asked, compelled by his training to say something.
‘No. I’m not inclined to open up at present.’
I stressed the opening up. He got it, and gave a sort of pant of relief. He had evidently heard of the proposed gentlemen’s agreement, but doubted it.
‘About that Mr Fosworthy’s property which you recommended,’ I went on. ‘You had better know that his housekeeper has informed the police that she is worried over his absence.’
‘Oh, not already!’
I heard the clerk at the door and changed the position of my chair. When he was out of the room again and I had my thirty pounds, I got up to go.
‘If you don’t mention this visit of mine, I shan’t either,’ I said. ‘You may have noticed that I did not let your clerk see my neck, and I was careful to hide it when I walked in.’
‘I don’t quite follow,’ he whined. ‘Perhaps I ought to.’
‘It may become clear in time. I hope it never will. But if enquiries are made, I promise you that there is no traceable connection between a man wanted by the police and Mr Yarrow who is well known to you and was expected this morning at the bank.’
‘I suppose you have appropriated someone’s clothes,’ he said with the first sign of intelligence I had ever seen in him. ‘I told them at the time that you couldn’t go anywhere in your condition. It’s not our fault. Really it was not the fault of the rest of us. I hope there is no ill feeling. You and Fosworthy—Oh God, I wish I’d never seen the place!’
‘Come! Come!’ I replied, shaking the limp hand which was held out to me. ‘Think of your spiritual development! And now you know you’ll never be any good as a murderer. All gain, my dear man!’
He let me out by a side door. It was twenty to one by his office clock. The police would certainly be looking for me now in Wells, Glastonbury and every neighbouring town. Still, if that poor patient—to whom I wish a long life without another hospital in it—did not go and die before the operation was over, it could not be known how I was dressed. I took out my hat, punched it into shape and paid off my taxi-driver. A nearby public lavatory enabled me to put the hat back in its uncomfortable hiding place.
I jumped on a bus which was just starting for Bridgwater. Up to then I had been intoxicated by speed and luck, concentrating always on the next five minutes. Now that I had time to think, I realised that I would never be any good as a murderer either. Just as soon as the police started to make enquiries of taxi-drivers and my man reported a customer who made a mysterious call at Warminster, they would be on my trail. I nearly jumped off the bus at the second village in a cold sweat, and had to tell myself firmly that the hell of a lot of good that would do. The taxi had driven away before I got on the bus. And, anyway, they would be looking for a man in a black hat, and I was sitting on it.
At Bridgwater I found a train leaving at once for Taunton and took it. Once clear of Taunton station, I felt more confident. After all, I was not so important that all Somerset police would be alerted in the first hour. So I went into a shop and fitted myself out with a cravat—grabbing it off the counter and instantly putting it on—together with a cheap blazer and a suit-case. I didn’t care whether the police traced that purchase or not. By the time they did, I should have vanished into London.
An express to Paddington. A carefree dinner on the train. A walk to my flat as a harmless, returning holidaymaker. That was that, except that I had not got a key. However, the fire escape and the cautious breaking of the bathroom window dealt with that problem. I have always longed to know how far ahead of the pursuit I really was. I am sure the police must have guessed I took that Bridgwater bus, leaving so conveniently, but they never got on to my visit to the bank. I waited with some anxiety to be asked to confirm that I, as Mr Yarrow, had been in Glastonbury and cashed a cheque for thirty pounds. However, the detective of my imagination never called.
It was, as always, from an entirely unexpected quarter that Fosworthy re-entered my life. After burning the blazer and the cravat—I of course wore another one continuously—and anonymously returning the anaesthetist’s clothes to the hospital, I spent a peaceful week getting my breath back and trying to convince myself that justice ought to be done. I did not succeed. I think I can honestly say that it was not only the inconvenience and possible danger to myself which counted. I was also dead certain that Fosworthy would have wished me to leave matters as they were.
Disengagement, however, was shattered by a letter. Noticing the postmark, I thought it was from Gorm. It was more disturbing.
Dear Sir,
I have been trying to telephone you but doesn’t answer. I am a friend of Mr & Mrs Gorm though do not myself visit public houses who said they was sure you’d not mind my putting you a question about what I am worried about. Would like much to call on you Wednesday afternoon if convenient.
Yours faithfully,
Emmanuel Hawkins.
I remembered the name as that of the farmer whose land adjoined the cart track behind The Green Man. It was he who had grown and wired the formidable hedge in which Fosworthy had been stuck. I knew he disliked fox-hunting, which gave a rather tenuous connection with Fosworthy.
It was no use funking the meeting. In any case this did not smell of blackmail or of any half-baked attempt on me. You are quite safe so long as we are Jedder had said. I took the simple precaution of arranging the meeting in a public place and wrote off at once asking Mr Hawkins to tea—since he did not like public
houses—at a neighbouring café.
I felt at ease with him at once. He was an old-fashioned West Country farmer, probably the son of a farmer. Very properly he wore a bowler hat in London—a tradition much earlier than that of regular soldiers and civil servants with their rolled umbrellas and brief cases. To me, brought up with a respect for market towns, it did not seem eccentric. Indeed there was nothing extraordinary about him except that he radiated honesty and individualism. He was a contented man who could not possibly be one of Jedder’s tight-lipped associates.
He let me know his business within a minute of sitting down at the table. He was that sort of character: not abrupt, but promptly weighing up the other fellow, right or wrong, and going straight to the point.
‘I’ve come about a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Likely as not you won’t know him, but if you’re going to live down our way, as Mrs Gorm tells me you’ve a mind to, it won’t be long before you hear tell of him. I hope so. I hope indeed he’s not in any trouble.’
He told me that on the morning of September 3rd he had gone down early to have a look at an ailing ewe, and his eye had been caught by a red and yellow rag in his boundary hedge which, he was sure, had not been there the day before. ‘If that don’t belong to Barnabas,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m a Dutchman.’
His introduction was detailed and gave me time to compose my face and to avoid showing any sign of recognising the name. Fosworthy had evidently lost his handkerchief while squirming through the hedge; he always kept it in his left sleeve, and it was always of coloured silk with a Paisley pattern. I don’t know whether these expensive squares were his only luxury, or whether he had some theory that germs were more contented in silk.
‘Hedge looked a bit worse for wear,’ Mr Hawkins went on, ‘But he might be up to anything, Barnabas. Might have found a sheep stuck in the thorn, though there weren’t no bramble and not enough fleece this time of year. And the Lord knows what he was doing of any way.
‘Well, more’n a week later I was passing his house. When the woman as does for him comes to the door, I asks: ‘where’s his reverence?’ which is what we called him though he never set foot in church nor chapel. ‘Hopped it unexpected,’ she says. ‘Trust him to leave his toothbrush or such behind him, but not every blessed thing!’ Well, I asked if he was all right. He wasn’t what one would call touched, Mr Yarrow, but he had some ways which ain’t yourn nor mine.
‘I’ve ’ad a postcard from Reading,’ she says, ‘and another from London, so he’s all right in the flesh, but I’m not that sure of his head. You won’t believe it,’ she says, ‘but he’s running after some ’ussy.’ ‘You don’t say, missus!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘because I ’eard him walking up and down his little library whispering Darling! Darling! to himself.’ I told her it must have been something he read in a book. But she would have it that it was a different voice, not like him talking to the author and saying he’d got hold of the right end of the stick.’
I asked Mr Hawkins innocently if this Fosworthy hadn’t made arrangements for someone to look after his stock while he was away.
‘Oh, he don’t farm! Always with his books and such! A vegetarian, he is. I got to know him when he was holding forth about blood sports, as he called them. Myself I ain’t for ’em or against ’em. But on my land it’s live and let live. If I kills a fat capon for my Sunday dinner, that’s what fowls are for. And if fox kills one for his’n, that’s what foxes are for.’
He looked at me challengingly. In his own way he had just expressed the famous synthesis; but of course it begged far too many questions for Fosworthy ever to have noticed the resemblance.
‘He’s full of goodness,’ Mr Hawkins went on. ‘That’s why some folk think him not right in the head. They ain’t used to it. That woman who does for him, now—blowed if she hasn’t told the police that someone might shut him up by mistake!’
‘You don’t think that is what happened then?’
‘No! What worries me, Mr Yarrow, is that on the night he left his handkerchief in my hedge, why didn’t he call and see me? So just on the chance the Gorms might have set eyes on him, I asked ’em. Old Gorm looks up his book and says that was the night you stayed in his bungalow, and if there was anything to be heard at the bottom of my land you’d have heard it. And that’s why I’m here.’
I said I much wished I could help him—which was true enough so far as it went.
‘Well, now I’ve talked to you, I know you would if you could,’ he replied. ‘But what happened to the cat?’
‘What cat?’
‘The cat with a broken back which scratched you.’
‘I’ve no idea. It sort of struggled off,’ I said.
‘They do hide themselves proper. I had a good look round the old stables to see if there was any trace of Barnabas. But there wasn’t no cat either.’
I saw the whole thing now. When Mrs Gorm mentioned the accident and the mess in my bed, Hawkins began to wonder just whose blood it was.
‘Haven’t his friends any notion of where he could be?’ I asked.
‘A mazy lot! Chap called Jedder is the only one that’s any use when he ain’t shooting or hunting. And look where that’s got him! And there’s the vet. But I don’t want to bother him with the trouble he’s in himself.’
I didn’t take up the reference to Jedder, but I did ask what trouble the vet was in, to see what Hawkins would say about him.
‘Lost his arm. Aviston-Tresco, his name is. Him and Barnabas Fosworthy was thick as thieves. But he gives me the creeps, he does. I won’t have him on the place. I’m all for a man being pitiful, if you see what I mean, but not when it comes to whispering to an old cow with the staggers that he’s sorry for what he has to do. Yet I’ve heard folk speak of him as if he was a sort of saint. And I’ll say this for him! He wouldn’t hurt a fly, no more than what Barnabas Fosworthy would.’
Cheerful, that was! I saw myself trying to persuade a hard-headed Somerset jury against the solid evidence of all the witnesses to character.
‘Are you seriously telling us, Yarrow, that these harmless citizens whom you attacked and maimed for life believed that murder was justifiable because there wasn’t any death?
‘I am.’
‘And you say they were inspired by these remarkable paintings which you yourself hoped to exploit commercially?’
‘Well, it’s not so easy as all that. …’
‘Answer yes or no!’
The scene was far too vivid in imagination. When I said good-bye to Emmanuel Hawkins, I was glad that I had not given way to temptation and told him what I knew.
That mood did not last when I was alone. I asked myself what Hawkins would have done in my position. The desperate Fosworthy could easily have called on him, not me. Well, of course he wouldn’t have stood for this nonsense a moment. On the other hand he would have been in the clear from the word go. Nobody could accuse him of plotting to cash in on the underground National Gallery.
I hate indecision. Time and again in my career I have lost patience with the dithering of managers and partners, and acted. That may be why I have never had steady success. I’m not a good committee man. I mention this only because I want to make it plain that I thoroughly disliked myself and could not recognise myself.
Though the horror of Fosworthy’s death and my imprisonment was fading, I could no longer carry it alone. After Hawkins’ visit and the suspicions which—for the time being—he had dropped. I had to ask for advice, or not so much advice as moral support. There was only one man from whom I could get it: Dunton. I called him up and asked if he would give me an hour or two of his evening. So long as I did not go through Wells and did not stop until my car was outside his front door, the chance of any policeman recognising me was negligible.
I drove down the following afternoon. There they were again in the evening light—the mother, the daughters, the ponies, the radiance. I felt inexorably separated now from this simplicity, as if the memories which I carr
ied into the house were visible. It was not fair, for I could not put my finger on any guilt of mine or deliberate aggression. Yet I was dirtied.
‘I felt I might see you some time soon,’ Dunton said as soon as he had given me a drink. He had taken me into his study, not into the garden.
I replied that if there were anything at all in telepathy, he should have felt it pretty strongly, that I had spent twenty-four hours trying to reach him.
‘Where’s Fosworthy?’ he asked.
‘Why that question?’
‘Remembering our last conversation. You were interested in Aviston-Tresco and Alan Jedder.’
‘Fosworthy is dead,’ I said, and told him my story.
He did not interrupt—psychiatrist’s training, I suppose—until I had finished and was floundering about in morals and the climatic effect of Ynys Witrin.
‘Let me have a look at the neck,’ he said.
I took off my cravat.
‘It has not quite healed yet, but it shouldn’t give any trouble. They must have intended plastic surgery later.’
It struck me that he was just wasting time while he made up his mind what to say.
‘You aren’t afraid of me, are you?’ I asked.
He gave me actual physical comfort, putting his arm round my shoulders and hugging me. He had brilliant insight. I must have needed that touch, for I nearly burst into tears.
‘My dear boy,’ he said though he wasn’t much older than I, ‘I know no one more sane or less likely to commit violence.’
That relaxed me, so that I could sit on the opposite side of his desk and answer as factually as I could all the questions he put to me.
‘I get the impression,’ he said at last, ‘that you yourself half believe them justified.’
‘What? In that cruelty? And murdering Fosworthy?’
‘I meant the paintings: their influence on all of you. Would I see in the mammoth and the animals what Fosworthy saw and what you see?’
The Courtesy of Death Page 13