A Penknife in My Heart

by Nicholas Blake

  N. returns today. For some reason I dread it—not because of Brian though. It must be the fear of going again into the desert which N. and I create when we are together. Last night I was desperate, and Brian saw it, and I made him kiss me. What a squalid little triumph! I must face this—that for the first time since we married I am contemplating being unfaithful to my husband. Mortal sin. B. is very sweet, but I feel as cold about it as a whore. I can only pray for a miracle to save me.

  Helena had written nothing in the book after his return from Norfolk, till the day he went to Bristol. This last entry was in an agitated, jerky handwriting, and the ink had been smudged here and there.

  Ned has left, looking ill and exhausted. It is my fault. I feel as if my last chance had gone. What is this devil that possesses me and makes me torment the one person in the world I love? I would rather see disgust or hatred in N’s eyes than indifference. If I killed myself—but that is forbidden—he might remember only the good things about me: my ghost would be easier for him to live with than I am. I behave like a bitch and a madwoman, but I am not vindictive, I am not. The only thing I can do now for N. is to release him—he wants it, he said so. But I haven’t the strength to let go of him. So I shall take Brian as a lover, tonight—in misery and despair—plunge into damnation with my eyes open. I shall tell N. when he comes back: it will cut the silver cord.

  Here the diary broke off. Perhaps she had heard Brian Holmes at the door. Rising to his feet, Ned Stowe stared at himself in the mirror, as if trying to see the man Helena had seen. The lips of the man moved. “So she died in vain, after all,” he was sardonically, wretchedly saying. She had been going to give him grounds for divorce. She need not have been killed, nor Herbert Beverley. He could have gone to Laura with a clear conscience, and begun a life with her which would not have been—as now it was doomed to be—a ménage à trois. The eyes of the man in the mirror seemed to be searching out his secrets, sparing him nothing. Yes, he confessed to the relentless inquisitor, I am dishonest through and through—I told Laura and Stuart Hammer that I could not leave Helena because she held the purse strings: it was a lie. told to cover up an even more shaming truth—that I lacked the moral courage to break with her finally. “The silver cord.” Yes. “The dear little scruffy lost boy.” Yes—Helena was mother mòre than wife to me. I depended upon her, hurt her, lied to her; and if I had torn myself away from her, I should have left the greater part of myself in her hands.

  The curtains puffed in a sudden wind, and somewhere in the house a door banged. Seized by superstitious fear, Ned tore the diary pages out of the book, and running into the kitchen opened the anthracite stove. No, he thought, no—you can’t destroy her memory as easily as that: you’ve got to live with it, so you’d better start now. He folded the diary pages and put them in his wallet, then returning to the bureau replaced the book from which he had torn them in the secret drawer.

  The solitude of the house was no longer an absence of company: it had become a positive thing, following him as he roamed restlessly from room to room, inhabiting each room like a solid physical presence, speaking to him through the labeled furniture awaiting the auction—speaking more and more impatiently, as though eager to be rid of him and to occupy the house alone.

  A hand-painted bowl on the mantelpiece suddenly recalled to him, with the most intense and detailed vividness, the occasion when he and Helena had bought it: he remembered the cluttered little shop in Marksfield, the proprietor’s mustache and watering eyes, the very gesture with which Helena, smiling gleefully at him, had opened her purse. He scraped off the label, and wrapping the bowl in newspaper put it into one of his kit bags. Laura could make what she liked of it. Knowing Laura, he thought, she probably won’t make any comment on it at all—she’s wonderful at not making scenes, at sparing my feelings; but is she capable of understanding that I don’t always want them spared?

  He tried to think about Laura, to conjure up naked images of her; but it was too difficult, here and now. Dismissing her from his mind, Ned telephoned to Inspector Bartley and the Marksfield Hospital.

  12 The Aquarium Meeting

  On saturday afternoon, a week later, Ned Stowe passed through a turnstile of the zoo and made his way toward the aquarium. After visiting Brian Holmes in the hospital, and an interview with Inspector Bartley, he had sent to The Times for insertion in the Personal column the code message which he and Stuart Hammer had agreed upon, to be used only in extreme emergency, requesting a rendezvous at the aquarium. Hammer’s code reply, fixing it for the following Saturday, appeared in the paper two days later. No doubt it had been difficult for him to get away from the works any sooner; and besides, their meeting would be less conspicuous in the weekend crowds here.

  As he sat down on a bench, where he could keep the aquarium entrance in view, Ned looked cautiously around him. He was fairly sure that he was not under police observation, but the rendezvous had inevitably some risk attached to it. After that one devastating question which Bartley had asked him a week ago, Ned could hardly have retained a complete sense of security.

  He had taken a taxi just now from Laura’s flat to Paddington Station, where he dived into the Underground and took a Bakerloo train. The long ride from Chelsea to Paddington, and his own long sight as he kept watch through the back window of the cab, assured him there was no vehicle on his trail. But for all that, his heart still felt a load of vague apprehension as he studied the faces in the crowd that sauntered past, enjoying the brisk dry autumn afternoon.

  There were ten minutes to go before the time appointed. Relaxing his vigilance, Ned allowed his thoughts to be drawn back to the private room in Marksfield Hospital and the ravaged face of Brian Holmes. Brian was looking ill, defenseless, and for all his beard extremely young—young enough almost, thought Ned, searching the white face on the pillow for the resemblance to himself which others had seen, to be his own son. It roused in him a sudden compunction, akin to tenderness.

  “Don’t worry,” he had said, taking the limp hand, “it’s going to be all right.”

  Brian looked up at him, with the grateful, dull expression of a sick animal. “It’s good of you to come.”

  Ned talked for a little about Brian’s mother and the market garden; thanks to Sir Robert’s and Colonel Gracely’s good offices, everything there was under control again.

  “Oh, everyone’s been very kind,” said Brian, with a faint flick of irony that struck Ned’s tender conscience like a rawhide whip.

  “I hope the police haven’t been badgering you too much,” he said.

  “It’s not the police.” The young man’s voice was all at once saturated with misery, and the haunted look returned to his eyes. Ned felt that Brian had locked himself up again in his cell of despair—one could only communicate with him through a small grille. “If only I could remember!” muttered Brian, his fingers writhing together on the counterpane. “She was so sweet to me. I admired her so much. Until—”

  Ned helped him out. “Until she seduced you?”

  The young man involuntarily nodded, then gave his companion a horrified look. “To be talking to you about it! I must be going mad.”

  “It may help you to remember.”

  The firmness in Ned’s voice enabled Brian to control himself. “I didn’t mean to—when I went there, I was going to have supper and some music. Helena said how lonely she often was. She began to cry. Well, what could I do?” He was talking to himself again; Ned might not have been in the room. “She—I’d never had a woman before—I didn’t know—I really did love her, but she made it all so coldblooded, so mechanical: I might have been a dummy—yes, a dummy for an experiment. She was just making use of me.” Brian’s lusterless eyes brightened for a moment. “Yes, I see now. I was a substitute.” He gazed fully at Ned. “For you.”

  “I expect that was it, Brian,” Ned gently put in.

  “So after it had happened, I felt—oh, like my gall rising—a sort of slow, furious boiling-up inside me. I
wanted to hit her, shake her, make her aware of me somehow—of me.”

  “But you didn’t harm her then?”

  “No. I found I couldn’t. You see, she began to cry again. Crying and sobbing. It made me feel cold toward her, though: sort of detached and hopeless. I’d had enough. I thought perhaps her crying was just another trick, to excite me again. I couldn’t trust her any more. I’d thought she loved me, you see.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, I must have gone to sleep.”

  “And then,” said Ned strongly, “you were waked up and somebody hit you.”

  The spark appeared again in Brian’s eyes, and was as quickly extinguished. “Somebody—? No, it’s no good. I can’t remember.”

  Ned took him by the wrist. They were alone together in the room. If there was a dictaphone rigged up, or a policeman with his ear at the keyhole, it could not be helped. “You didn’t do it! I know you didn’t do it! For God’s sake, get that into your head!”

  But it was no use. Brian’s head rolled weakly on the pillow, there was no fight in him. “I shall never know,” he almost petulantly wailed, tears in his eyes. “They might as well hang me and have done with it. Oh God, why did I—? I can’t forgive myself.”

  “It’s me you should try to forgive.” Ned gazed at him strangely—his alter ego, his substitute, his victim—and said good-by.

  Five minutes later, he was in Bartley’s office. A recollection of a Simenon novel, in which the murderer kept forcing his company upon the detective officer, floated into Ned’s mind. The first time he had sat here he had congratulated himself on his impunity. Now, like a child caught pilfering, he imagined the inspector’s eyes fixed upon his right hand—the hand scarred from the bite of Herbert Beverley’s dog—and hid it in his pocket after Bartley had shaken it.

  “I’ve just been visiting Brian Holmes,” he said. “How much longer are you going to keep him in suspense?” Guilt, and something else, sharpened his voice: the question was rapped out in a positively officer-class way.

  “It’s not in my hands, sir,” Bartley replied.

  “You mean, you haven’t enough evidence?”

  “We don’t charge a man just for the sake of charging somebody,” said Bartley with repressive dignity.

  “You can’t really believe he did it.”

  “Oh, what I believe—” Bartley broke off, aware of a lapse from official decorum. More to get things back on an impersonal footing than out of curiosity, he went on, “Does the name Arthur Lee mean anything to you, sir?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Or Stuart Hammer?”

  Ned felt a sense of suffocation. It almost startled him that he could, in a moment, breathe and speak. “Stuart Hammer? No.”

  “To the best of your knowledge Mrs. Stowe was not acquainted with either of these men?”

  “No.”

  Inspector Bartley began to explain about the car with the Norringham registration plate.

  “Oh yes. Colonel Gracely mentioned that to me.”

  “Indeed, sir?” said Bartley, privately registering disapproval of his chief constable’s tendency to gossip with the colonel. However, this pleasant Mr. Stowe was the murdered woman’s husband: he had a right to know what the police were doing about it—to know that they were not leaving even the unlikeliest stones unturned. Bartley had heard only this morning from the Norringham police, he now told Ned, that the owner of the car, a Mr. Arthur Lee, had after further questioning admitted he’d lent it for a couple of nights to his friend Stuart Hammer. They had, in fact, swapped cars—something to do with a bet.

  “And they’ve interviewed this Stuart Hammer, I suppose?” Ned hoped he sounded interested but not very interested.

  “Yes. It seems he has an alibi for the night in question. Not that we really expected anything from this line of investigation.”

  “An alibi?”

  The inspector’s large ears turned slightly pink: he had never quite got over a tendency to be shocked at the way certain types of people leaped into bed with one another. “He was sleeping with a maid at the country club where he resides.”

  “I see.” Ned saw nothing, except that Hammer must have bribed the maid heavily to give him this alibi; and a person who can be bribed can also be broken down.

  “So that’s another dead end, is it?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid so, sir. Unless some connection between your wife and Mr. Hammer could have been established.”

  “Quite so. Which means you’re back at Brian Holmes, or some mysterious X?”

  The inspector shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “You’ve got to find the man, Bartley,” Ned urgently pursued.

  “I understand your feelings, sir. Naturally, you want your wife’s murderer—”

  “Oh, it’s not retribution I’m after. I’m concerned about the living. Brian Holmes—and his mother.”

  Ned paused. He was giving Bartley his chance: if Mrs. Holmes had reported to the inspector that “I know Brian didn’t do it” of his, now was the time for Bartley to bring it up. But all the latter said was:

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but patience. If Holmes recovers his memory under treatment, he may be able to give us a description of the man who attacked him.”

  “So you do believe he’s innocent.”

  “Frankly, sir, on our present evidence, yes. You can’t get round that blow he received. The doctors are quite firm it couldn’t have been self-inflicted. It must have knocked him out instantaneously, which means Mrs. Stowe—”

  “Yes, yes, that’s understood.”

  “And no weapon has been found. Oh, it’s a proper riddle, sir.”

  “And if Brian fails to recover his memory, he’ll go through life thinking he may be a murderer. …”

  With those words buzzing in his brain like a vindictive hornet, Ned now saw a stocky, cocky figure—recognizable to him, without the beard and the eyeshade, only by its gait—strolling toward the aquarium entrance. The man might have walked out of a dream or a history book, so remotely unreal did the nature of their original meeting seem now to Ned. He himself might have been a youth waking up from the stupor of intoxication to see on the pillow beside him the raddled, rumpled face of a prostitute who, the night before, had been Aphrodite.

  Grimacing sourly, Ned rose to his feet. For a minute he attentively watched the stream of people who were following Stuart Hammer into the aquarium: none of them looked like plain-clothes men—not that he flattered himself he could infallibly recognize the type. Then he joined the stream.

  Stuart Hammer, though he anticipated no danger, had taken his own precautions. He did not believe he was under police observation; but Ned wouldn’t have stuck that S.O.S. message in the Personal column without some reason.

  Standing in front of a tank near the entrance, he watched a large turde pursue a smaller one, snapping viciously.

  “Naughty, naughty!” he said aloud.

  “Somebody ought to do something about it,” remarked a weedy little man beside him in an adenoidal voice.

  “Plunge in and rescue the little flipper, mate, if it worries you,” said Stuart.

  “You’ve no call to use that tone to me.”

  Stuart Hammer was about to take it further when, beyond the aggrieved little man, he saw Ned Stowe, who with the slightest jerk of his head indicated that Stuart should follow him, and made for the exit. Stuart was not best pleased. Clearly the aquarium was too crowded for any private conversation; but Stuart, particularly since Herbert Beverley’s death, was accustomed to giving the orders, not taking them. However, he followed Ned Stowe at a distance of thirty yards or so, out of the zoo, until they reached an open, grassy space in Regent’s Park. In the middle of this, under a tree, there were two unoccupied green chairs, back to back, one on either side of the slender trunk. Ned sat down. Stuart Hammer took the other chair, lit a cigar, and studied the terrain. Old Ned—you had to hand it to him—had chosen a good place: nobody could ap
proach without one of them spotting him.

  “Well, here we are again. What seems to be the trouble?” he asked carelessly.

  “Brian Holmes may be arrested for the murder of my wife.”

  “Brian Holmes? Never heard of him.”

  “Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Only The Times, chum. Who is this fellow?”

  “He’s the fellow you found in bed with my wife and hit over the head.”

  “Oh, him. Weedy type. Gave me quite a turn, finding him there. You might have warned me.”

  “Well, what are we going to do about it?”

  “Do about it?” said Stuart sharply. “What the hell should we do about it? Damn-all, of course. Have you dragged me up to London just to—?”

  “Pipe down. Ticket collector.”

  As he fumbled for coppers, Stuart reflected that Ned Stowe had got decidedly above himself since their last meeting: or was it that the blighter had lost his nerve? Handing the coins to the ticket collector, Stuart twisted in his chair, trying to get a look at his companion, but only the back of his head was visible.

  When the man had moved on, Ned remarked, “What was the idea, knocking Holmes out like that? You might have killed him.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t know at the time he was a friend of yours,” Stuart replied with heavy facetiousness. Then his voice hardened. “Should I have waked him up and asked him to watch while I—Don’t be such a bloody silly clot.”

  “And then—” the voice at Stuart’s back changed timbre—“and then you had to knock Helena about before you—You seem to have lost your head completely.”

  Stuart Hammer was in a cold rage now. “I lost my head?. And what about you, little man? You bungled your job nicely—lost your nerve and couldn’t even drive the car straight.”

  “Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? What more did you want?”

  “No thanks to you. Clear off, sonny!” This last was addressed to a child who had come up and was staring at Stuart Hammer. The child threw a ball in his direction. Hammer picked it up and flung it violently away; the child stumbled after it, howling.