Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper

by Donald Henderson

  Beads of sweat broke out on Mr Bowling’s forehead when it slowly came to him for the first time for a very long time indeed, that he wanted to live; he wanted to save himself.

  ‘My God,’ he thought in fright, ‘what a fool I’ve been!’

  It was queer, he thought later, that he didn’t then think nearly completely enough: what made him flatter himself that Miss Mason would marry him? He knew she loved him, the knowledge had been given him as a gift when he entered the room: but what made him think she could marry him? He who was evil itself?

  He only knew then that he wanted to save himself. He might save himself yet?

  But he couldn’t leave. She asked him to sit down, and he sat, hat on knee, thinking: ‘Mr Clark is now entering the flat. He is now stumbling over the body on the floor. He is now seeing the broken glasses. He is now, white-faced, telephoning the police.’

  Miss Mason was saying about Mrs Nandle.

  ‘How kind of her to remember my birthday. I’m thirty-four,’ she said quaintly. She hardly ever looked up at Mr Bowling, it was rather as if she knew she was no beauty, and would prefer that her sewing enjoyed her countenance. She said she had heard about the death of Delius Nandle, and she said she was sorry.

  ‘I’m very sorry too,’ said Mr Bowling in a dry, subdued voice. He kept licking his lips. He was quite tongue-tied. A lover indeed! ‘I dunno, I’m sure,’ he kept thinking stupidly. ‘Life tricks you at every bally turn!’

  Miss Mason said lots of things. Her manner of saying things was rather motherly, it was positive, a little as if Mr Bowling was her son, and she wanted to give him bits of news before packing him off to school. Her father, she said, was vicar of a little village on the south coast, and she only came up here now and again to stay with his sister, who ran this place. She didn’t say what ‘this place’ was, or where the sister was, or why the front door was wide open, or why the bell had come away in his hand. But she said that she didn’t stay here for long as a rule. ‘If anything upsets me,’ she said, ‘I go back to father.’

  ‘Upsets you?’ Mr Bowling heard himself say. He suddenly recognised the fact that, had he not gone down to the Nandles, he would never have met Miss Mason at all. And he recognised: ‘And I only went down at all because I knew darned well I wanted to murder old Nandle—so what can you make of that?’

  ‘When I say upset,’ Miss Mason’s ugly but kindly voice said, ‘I suppose I mean I’m rather sensitive! My aunt gets cross,’ was the only explanation she gave. ‘She suffers a lot with gout.’

  ‘Too much port,’ wondered Mr Bowling stupidly. He wasn’t really wanting to think that at all, it was just one of those many, many thoughts which filtered into the brainbox like dirty ink into blotting paper.

  ‘I love my father! He’s quite alone, except for the old maid. I only come up here because he begs me to. I like being with him and the sea.’

  ‘The sea,’ said drugged Mr Bowling.

  ‘I don’t know what I shall do when he dies! He’s ninety now,’ she looked up for a second and smiled. She said she had never expected to marry, and Mr Bowling thought:

  ‘Men are quite crazy! They think love must necessarily mean beauty of body! … But what does it matter about an ugly body? It’s the soul …’ He thought too: ‘The soul is the mind, of course.’

  Miss Mason said she was fond of Woolworths, but otherwise she didn’t like London much. She liked Chelsea and the river there, if she found herself there, and Battersea Park.

  Mr Bowling developed a passionate wish to get out in the street where there was air.

  ‘I must think about this,’ he thought frantically. ‘For the Lord’s sake let me out of here—I want to think!’

  Miss Mason thanked him for coming, and when he got out in a dry voice that he thought he would like to come again, ‘if I’m … free to,’ both of them knew that he meant it, though neither knew if he would.

  ‘Do please come whenever you like?’ asked Miss Mason. ‘Just come in, if the maid is out?’

  He got out into the street and started walking feverishly in the wrong direction.

  After a few moments of this, his terrible danger came back to him.

  ‘Struth,’ he thought frantically, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me—I’ve got to get rid of that body!’

  He started yelling in the street for a taxi, but there wasn’t one, so he started running.

  ‘If it isn’t too late,’ his feet tapped out. ‘If it isn’t too late?’

  His running feet tapped out awed prayers.

  ‘Oh, God, what have I done? What have I done? What dreadful thing happened to me?

  ‘Only grant me this,’ he prayed, ‘to get rid of the body, then I might have a sporting chance!’

  He still didn’t think about Miss Mason’s point of view. Such was the vanity of man, and the overpowering confidence of love.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE solemn brightness of Miss Mason’s green-grey eyes stayed with him as he ran. They looked alarmed and sad and full of knowledge. They looked young in the love-sense. They weren’t thirty-four years old.

  They hadn’t seen a man’s body; long lashes would flash down, guarding them from such a sight.

  He streaked up the road like a rabbit.

  He paused outside the Heights, getting his breath back, and preparing himself for either shock or relief. In the yellow gleam of light from the blacked-out swing doors, he looked like a stoat. He had died a thousand deaths; he had been caught by a dog, shot by a gun, beaten by a stick.

  But he was here, and there was still a chance. He would know in a minute or two.

  He went in very quickly and went straight to the lifts. They were both engaged, and he waited in dreadful suspense. The late Mr Farthing’s shop looked silent and sinister and dark. Doubtless, down in the club, Daphne was beginning to wonder where he had got to.

  The lift came at last and he got in alone and went up to the fifth floor. Here he opened the gates cautiously and quietly and peeped out.

  He took a frightful shock and plunged forward with a cry. Old Cooker and the manager were at his door; Mr Clark was extending a key.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ apologised Mr Clark, withdrawing the key.

  Mr Bowling let out a gasp. He scurried forward, a strange, plunging movement.

  ‘Can’t ask you in,’ he gasped, pale. ‘Frightfully sorry, but …’ He broke off, panting, the two men staring at him.

  Whenever this sort of thing happened to Mr Clark at the Heights, it was not a surprise, it meant there was a woman in hiding. He always tapped the side of his long nose and squinted slightly, and pursed his lips slightly, and nudged whoever was nearest.

  ‘Ah,’ he always nudged, ‘I see!’ and he said something about being men of the world. After all, they had to keep the flats full, it was all very well to think about morals, rents were the thing to think about.

  Mr Clark laughed, and Mr Bowling managed to laugh.

  Mr Cooker, frustrated again, stared stupidly at the two of them. What was the manager nudging him for? What? Oh—woman? Oh …! Mr Cooker had forgotten all about women, it was ages since he’d gone in for that lark.

  ‘It was just that Mr Cooker thought he heard a burglar in your flat, Mr Bowling!’

  Mr Bowling stood with his back to the flat door, smiling.

  ‘I know, old man! He told me! But it was nonsense,’ he laughed.

  Mr Clark laughed. His great nose was inclined to be bulbous.

  He ended his laugh with it.

  ‘And the only other thing was, Mr Bowling, I understood that you were leaving? Or so I thought? But the cleaner is a Belgian, and she must have misunderstood.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ said Mr Bowling. ‘So far as I know.’

  ‘Well, that is splendid,’ said Mr Clark, and began to move off.

  ‘Splendid?’ Mr Bowling’s smiling voice said.

  ‘Splendid?’ queried Mr Cooker, disappointed. It had all fallen very flat. All the excitement,
and now nothing at all, and Bowling not even going to ask him in for a drink? But he couldn’t, could he, if he’d got a woman in there? Had he got a woman in there?

  Mr Cooker jolly well knew he had not. He thought: ‘Shall I stop up a bit longer? Might hear something further? Or shall I go to bed?’

  Mr Bowling, slipping quickly into his flat, was thinking;

  ‘Safe—so far;’ and he was thinking what he would do with the late Mr Farthing. ‘It will be a very risky journey indeed,’ he thought, ‘but a little later on I’ll try and get him down to his furniture shop, and bung him in there. Can’t have him up here, when the Belgian turns up in the morning!’

  He switched on the bedroom light. The late Mr Farthing surprised him very much by already showing signs of getting stiff. ‘Rigor mortis,’ he thought. Mr Farthing was lying face downwards, and his nose had bled on the carpet.

  ‘It looks as if I’d better not delay things,’ thought Mr Bowling.

  With a resolute expression, he first of all tidied up the flat, collecting the broken glass and wrapping it in newspapers and putting it in the kitchen.

  He glanced at his watch. It was gone ten to eleven, and the club shut at eleven. He had it in mind to slip down and see if Daphne had taken fright yet, over Farthing’s prolonged absence. Farthing had never missed an evening in the club, it was one of the accepted facts about the place that ‘old Farthing’s on his stool as usual, shooting off his ugly mouth!’ First, he must spend a very gloomy few minutes washing up the blood, it was on Farthing’s ugly mouth, and had dried all over his broad nose, and it was on his hands, backs and fronts. Mr Bowling went and got his flannel and some hot water and a basin and some soap. He returned with it to the bedroom. When he had completed this singularly unpleasant task to his satisfaction, and brushed Mr Farthing’s clammy hair, he proceeded to pare Mr Farthing’s nails. They were sure to be full of bits of his murderer’s skin, or clothes, and would betray him under the microscope. Mr Farthing’s frightened eyes were wide open the whole time, watching him, and looking as if it was rather painful, having your nails carefully pared after you were dead. When he had finished, Mr Bowling shoved Mr Farthing’s dead head to and fro, rather fascinated by his broken neck, you could get it back an incredibly long way. Then he lugged Mr Farthing up and shoved him into the low chair in the bedroom, by the dressing table. He wanted to test his weight, and to see how he sagged. He sagged very badly when he tried to hold him upright, his toes hanging down, and his great head flopping forward. Mr Bowling got his own brown felt hat and shoved it on Mr Farthing’s head. It was a little too big, and Mr Farthing looked extremely grotesque in the deep chair there, with his knees all cock-eyed, and his shoulders sagging forward, and the brown hat bent in prayer. Mr Bowling looked at his watch again and hurried out.

  On the way down, he noticed very carefully indeed every step of the way, counting the paces and the number of stairs—he dared not use the lift—and wondering, when he got to the ground floor, if he really dare take the frightful risk of crossing the corner of the entrance lounge, along to the merciful shadows in front of Farthing’s shop?

  ‘I’ve simply got to,’ he thought. ‘There are no two ways about it! I’ll bung him in his bally shop, turn the place upside down, and who’s to say I’m the one who beat him up?’

  He hurried into the club.

  Daphne had the club almost to herself.

  ‘Where’s everybody tonight?’ he remarked, sitting at the counter and smiling at her.

  Daphne was wearing her kilt. He ordered an Advocat, and offered her one, which she accepted.

  ‘Thanks, I will!’

  ‘I suppose all the world is firewatching,’ he commented.

  ‘I think there’s a binge on somewhere,’ she told him. ‘There are a few in the billiard room, though. There’s a match on.’

  She didn’t say a word about Farthing.

  ‘Well, cheerio, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, and pursed her lips like a spout.

  ‘You’re looking very well, Daphne.’

  ‘Good,’ she beamed.

  He kept saying things, not wanting to ask direct where Farthing was. He’d better be careful.

  ‘Haven’t seen you lately,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Been away?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Country?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but didn’t enlarge.

  ‘I like the country,’ she said, ‘now and again. I wouldn’t like to live there, though.’

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit browned off with town. I don’t think I’d mind clearing out. For a time, anyhow.’

  ‘I hate the sea,’ she leaned on the counter and said.

  ‘Oh, I like the sea,’ he said.

  Conversation dried. He asked for another Advocat, and lit a fag. He went to the money machine.

  But he lost everything he put in, continually getting almost three nines, and almost three fives, but never quite.

  ‘I hope my luck isn’t run out,’ he said nervously.

  Her laugh came.

  ‘Keep trying,’ she said.

  ‘Have you cut your head?’ she said.

  He started.

  He also thought: ‘Miss Mason must have noticed my head? She never said a word, and she never looked at it! There’s breeding, for you!’

  ‘Fell,’ he said, at the money machine.

  ‘Tight again,’ she sing-songed, and started doctoring up her square face in a tiny mirror. She was like a cat, licking at things, and dabbing at herself, and preening. She’d purr in a minute, he thought.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he yawned, and sat on Mr Farthing’s stool, one hand holding his fag and the liqueur glass, the other in his pocket, ‘Ah,’ he said, unable to stand the strain any longer, ‘but I’m sitting on Mr Farthing’s stool! Mustn’t do that!’ He got up and finished his liqueur, glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said, powdering. ‘He won’t mind! What if he does?’

  Nervous and irritated, he looked in the billiard room. But he didn’t want to be dragged into some conviviality or other, and withdrew again. The cues were going: ‘Cli’k … cli’k …’ Admiral Leopard was behind a big cigar, tugging for the chalk.

  ‘Goodnight, Daphne,’ Mr Bowling said.

  ‘Cheerio, dear,’ she said, and smiled and started washing glasses. ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ she sing-songed, forgetting him completely. ‘It’s eleven,’ her voice followed him.

  He went up in the lift.

  ‘Hell,’ he thought. He thought: ‘Anyhow, she doesn’t appear to be worried about him!’

  He went into his flat.

  … The worst of being an amateur at crime, and particularly murder he reflected with considerable anxiety, was that you hadn’t spent a lifetime studying the tricks of the trade. You’d never even pinched anything. It had been very different in the recent days when you wanted to be caught; but, now, when you would almost sell your soul for life and liberty and new-found love, the most terrible crisis threatened second by second: any second, you might make a fatal slip; the thread would break, down would come the sword of Damocles, and a sorry visit to old Charybdis. Mr Bowling knew that his heart was beating, and that he was very much afraid. And when he was really afraid, his nervousness betrayed itself by an attitude of nonchalance, and rather tuneless whistling. He whistled Hot Sock Roleson and proceeded to put on his bowler hat. He went into his bedroom where the late Mr Farthing was still sitting looking dejected, felt hat bent downwards. The late Mr Farthing’s left arm had slipped downwards in a hanging position gloomy to behold. ‘The fellow weighs a ton,’ murmured Mr Bowling. ‘I shall be damn lucky if I get away with this! What do I do—drag him?’ He bent and put his arms about Mr Farthing, and heaved him up and out into the little hall. Everything about Mr Farthing hung heavily downwards in a thoroughly unhelpful manner, and the felt hat fell off. Mr Bowling dropped him and put the hat back on
again. ‘If only you knew it,’ he murmured nervously, ‘you are looking extremely silly!’ On an impulse, he opened the front door and peeped out. There was nobody about, ‘No,’ he thought, ‘but the moment I ruddy well start my act, the bally passage will be alive with people!’ He went back.

  He tried a little rehearsal in the flat. He got an arm round Mr Farthing, hoisted him up, and took him for a little walk up and down the sitting room. Mr Farthing didn’t like it at all. He hung back shyly, and sloped downwards modestly, and the hat fell off again. Mr Bowling dropped him in disgust and sat in the armchair and lit a fag. He sat smoking and staring at him. ‘I shall never do it,’ he feared. ‘I shall never make it in a thousand years!’ He sat smoking and staring. He wondered whether to lump him out of the window. No, no! They’d easily trace him back to this flat. Some bally technical thing would give the show away. Measurements! And to dump him out in the passage and go to bed was equally silly. And just the same risk. ‘I’ve got to do it,’ he decided. ‘First thoughts are best! I’ve got to get him down to his shop!’

  He had an idea and got up again, stubbing out his cigarette. He went into the bedroom and got a dark coloured silk handkerchief. It was those dragging legs of Farthing’s. ‘I was jolly good at the three legged race at school,’ he remembered. ‘Opposite legs tied together, arms intertwined.’

  The late Mr Farthing did not at all like intertwining his arm with Mr Bowling, and he made a considerable fuss about it, looking resentful, with the felt hat crushed down over his eyes, and the left side of his body tied by the leg to Mr Bowling’s right. Mr Bowling finally managed to put the dead left arm into his own pocket.

  ‘Now,’ said Mr Bowling.

  Mr Cooker was putting on a pair of red-striped pyjamas. He was tired of thinking he heard guns, or of thinking that fellow Bowling had got somebody in there. He twice went to his door and softly opened it; but the first time he found that it was Miss Phelps opposite who had opened a door, so as to put out a milk bottle. She would do the dustbin next, like she always did, last thing. So when he again heard a door open, Mr Cooker did not go to the door, feeling sure it was Miss Phelps again with her dustbin.