Now, quietly, he again thought he heard a door open, was it hers or Mr Bowling’s?
There was a distinct sound of somebody passing his door.
It was from Mr Bowling’s direction.
Mr Cooker did not care to go to the door with his pyjamas undone, and without his dressing gown, just in case Miss Phelps might see him, for that would be most improper. So he hurriedly tied up his pyjamas and flung on his dressing gown.
He went to his door and softly opened it.
Just too late.
He saw a shadow disappear round the corner to the lifts, rather a bulky shadow.
‘Damn,’ said Mr Cooker.
‘Damn,’ said Mr Bowling, and was forced to take a rest. He was no weakling, but this was terrific. He got Farthing up against a corner of the stairs, thank goodness the lights were so delightfully dim on the stairs, what excellent economy! People rarely used the stairs, unless the lifts were broken down; if somebody passed now, and saw the two of them, a bowler hat and a felt hat, they might reasonably think of drunks, especially if one had the breath to whistle. Mr Bowling started to whistle, but heard approaching footsteps. All the moisture went out of his mouth and his whistling ceased. He stood stock still, heart thumping.
The footsteps took a turn away, and faded out.
‘Come along,’ murmured Mr Bowling. ‘You’ll get me hanged, if we hang about here! Please remember—I can’t drop you and bolt for it! Our legs are tied together!’
He got his burden safely down to the last flight. Increasing light at his feet indicated the curtained entrance from the staircase to the foyer.
Twenty yards, now; but a sheer gauntlet of light, and possibly porters and people.
There was the drone of voices, and the sound of somebody using the stamp machine.
He waited.
‘No,’ a girl’s voice said.
‘What for?’ a man’s voice said.
‘Well, I’ve written, anyway! Shall I post it here, darling?’
‘Better post it outside!’
‘We can post it here!’
‘You do whatever you think,’ the man’s voice said.
‘Shall I? Or shan’t I?’
‘Make up your mind,’ Mr Bowling said, through his teeth. ‘My arm’s nearly breaking!’
CHAPTER XX
HE counted: one, two, three, four, five—six.
He went through the curtains. Straining every muscle in his body, he got Mr Farthing out into the brilliant light of the foyer. There was a man reading a novel by the fire there. He didn’t look up, and Mr Bowling safely reached the shop, and the shadowed angle where was the door. As he did so, out of the corner of his eyes he saw a police inspector and a sergeant enter the foyer holding torches.
They were doing the rounds, looking for lights from improperly blacked-out windows. To do this, they had to pass close to the shop front, and out into the inner yard where the bicycles were stacked. Mr Bowling thought:
‘I’ve got about four seconds before they reach me,’ and at the same moment realised it had not occurred to him that the shop door would naturally be locked. His shaking hand tried the handle, and it didn’t budge.
He held Farthing tightly against the glass door and offered up a prayer. With his free hand he frantically started groping in Mr Farthing’s pockets for the key. It must obviously be on him. He found it on him, it was in his left hand trouser pocket—but it was on a chain and it didn’t reach the door. The two voices drew nearer and nearer.
Nearer and nearer.
An angular light from one of their torches showed Mr Bowling the picture of his face, and the late Mr Farthing’s face, flattened against the glass of the shop door.
Frozen with fear, he could only stand there, flat, waiting.
Time ceased altogether.
The officers of the law, however, heard the small, faraway voice of Destiny say:
‘Look over this way! Really, the way those Smiths do their windows is a disgrace, their light can be seen down by the river!’
They vanished.
Mr Bowling got the key off the chain, got the door open and fell in.
He softly closed the door again and locked it. He sat on the floor, all but collapsed, and started to undo the silk handkerchief round his leg. ‘Now is not the time to collapse,’ he thought. ‘While I am in here, there is constant danger!’
He put the handkerchief in his pocket, resolved to forget nothing. He took out a pair of gloves from his pocket, and carefully put them on. He may be an amateur, but he had read all about finger prints. He dragged Mr Farthing along the floor a bit until he bumped into something. Nervously, he struck a match, instantly blowing it out again. It was all right, the blackout arrangements were done for the night, and in any case he had seen inside the shop enough to know the geography of the place fairly well. He went into Mr Farthing’s little office, closing the door and finding the lamp switch. Quietly but thoroughly, he turned the place upside down, contents of the drawers on the floor, ledgers on the floor, everything on the floor. Then he put out the light and returned to the shop.
But Mr Bowling had not remembered the geography of the little shop quite so well as he had thought. Crossing as he thought, with utmost care to the door, he bumped ever so slightly into something, and to his horrified ears there proceeded to come a series of resounding crashes of shattered china horses and plates.
It was immediately followed by a rattling on the door.
He stood stock still in the darkness.
With great presence of mind, as he thought, Mr Bowling was remembering Mr Farthing’s key, when the voice called.
‘Mr Farthing? Is that you …? Who’s there?’
It was Daphne.
‘Who’s there, I say? Mr Farthing …?’
He had got the key back on the chain when her step moved away. He knew very well that he had about a split-second chance of getting out unseen. ‘My gloves,’ he thought, fairly calmly, and groped about. He had been obliged to take them off in order to get the key back on the ring. He groped about, telling his trembling body: ‘Steady, now, don’t panic whatever you do! Or you’ll make a mess of it!’ He got his gloves, put them on as he groped his way like a blind man to the door. There must be no finger prints on the door knob.
He found the door knob, opened it slowly and cautiously—and slipped out. He closed it and in a third of a second was in safety.
As he re-entered the foyer, Daphne came round the corner by the stamp machine, with Mr Clark. Neither looked at him and he went quietly up the stairs.
When he reached his flat he went straight to the bathroom and was violently sick. Afterwards, he took off all his clothes and wrapped them in a parcel. They had blood on them, and some of the blood might be Mr Farthing’s. He put the parcel in the kitchen cupboard which was under the sink, until such time as he had decided what to do with it. He was going to do something with it that very night, the sooner the better. Then he had a bath and dressed again. He could honestly say that he felt as safe as anybody else in the entire block of flats, for the late Mr Farthing had had many enemies. He felt refreshed and rather admired himself in his blue suit. He had a brandy in the sitting room, knowing what he was now going to do; he was going to write a very long letter. The bruise on his temple was a bit sore, and might be rather telltale; but somehow or other he felt optimistic and confident and clear headed. He didn’t feel at all like sleep.
‘Coffee,’ he suddenly thought. It would be very nice to have a lot of sweet, black coffee.
‘It will help me to write,’ he thought.
And while the coffee was brewing, he stood with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, and burst out laughing.
‘B’rf!’ he burst. ‘Good Lor’, what a bally scare—what?’ He thought: ‘Phew!’ He went in for quite a lot of little laughs.
Then, he sat before the white sheets of paper, his brow furrowed, and his face saddened, rather as if he was a man about to write out a plea which he knew jolly
well could never succeed. Yet, he must write it.
‘My last and only chance,’ he thought, ‘of happiness!’
He put those actual words, too. His last and only chance of happiness, but adding humbly that he knew how very slight that chance was, ‘and little I deserve to come to it.’
He started the letter in quite the ordinary manner, putting ‘My dear Miss Mason’, after all, he didn’t know her very well. He explained that it was all very well to say he had known her all his life, ever since she was a little girl over a school fence, whom he’d called Angel; but that seemed rather silly, now. In matters of etiquette, he had only met Miss Mason once, and despite the depth of his feelings, he could not even go so far as to ask her christian name.
In the same humble way, he signed the letter: ‘Yours sincerely, W. Bowling’. In the rather sacred atmosphere of thought and feeling, under the deeply human and spiritual strain of which he wrote, it seemed rather dreadful to write a common-or-garden name like William; and as for its distressing abbreviation—Bill—well, it was not to be thought of, it was like forgetting oneself and exclaiming ‘Gosh’ in church. He said to Miss Mason that he had sinned ‘most inordinately, and in a more serious way than other men,’ and while he did not seek to excuse it, for that would rob from the voluntary act of penitence, which, although he was not a Roman Catholic, was such an integral part of his feelings and beliefs, he did yet feel ‘that I have come to the end of a very long and very dark journey, on foot, and much of the journey was through a wood, where there were one or two bears to kill.’ He said when he walked into her room, and saw the crucifix standing there in between the two candles, ‘I felt I had come home. And you were sitting there, and there was everything about you, and about your room, which helped me to understand.’
Then he told her in detail all about his murders.
Also he said:
‘Which brings me to the very great question as to whether we are to believe that punishment for sin is of necessity meted out in this world; or held over. In the battle for Good and Evil, which takes place in all of us, surely that battle can hardly be said to have come to the last round until Death? … Yet, how fully I know that I am now merely praying and seeking and hoping for two things: that God will reserve Judgment on me for a time—and that you will believe my penitence and sincerity, and succeed in understanding my motive, for, I dare to say, motive is everything in all things? How often do we hear said—it was the thought behind it? For my part, if the head is full of penitence for wrongs done, and the heart full of Heaven-sent love, and the soul full of good music, there you have the man, and such a man can reasonably plead: I have made a mess of things, through fog and impatience—pity me.’
When Mr Bowling stopped and re-read passages like that, he felt himself going rather red. ‘Struth,’ he thought shyly. ‘Hark at me!’ But he meant it all, and was secretly rather pleased with his writing, thinking modestly: ‘H’m—yes, that’s pretty good, what? I rather like that.’
Here and there through the letter, he made it sound as if he and Miss Mason were here together, talking. ‘Believe me, Miss Mason, I am trying so hard to convince you.’
And:
‘Well, Miss Mason, I can only assure you that, even as I write this very long letter to you, my mood alternates minute by minute. One minute I think I may yet have the very great good fortune of hearing from you that my plea is not in vain; and the next—that when I call for your answer I shall find only your empty room, yourself and the crucifix gone, like a dear but sorry dream. You will have gone back, upset, to your father.’
He concluded with rather a nice bit about ‘the kindly silence of the night, I am sitting here alone, and yet in the knowledge that, whatever your answer, I can never really be alone again. Please believe in my sincerity, Miss Mason?’
CHAPTER XXI
HE fell asleep at the table.
He slept there, waking into semi-consciousness now and again, but only to change his position and to rest his chin on the other arm.
When he finally woke up properly it was three in the morning. He walked about, yawning, had a wash and made himself a cup of tea.
Then he walked about, sipping from the cup, and holding the letter he had written, reading over paragraphs and feeling pleased and hopeful.
‘How wonderful could the future be … If only a man knew that patience and complete blindness was the right thing always, and trust in Destiny … Never to try and force things … The dreadful need, which is not a need at all, to inflict suffering on others.
‘How guilty I have been, Miss Mason. I wonder if you like Wordsworth, I have been sitting reading Guilt and Sorrow. Afterwards my eyes fell on Troilus and Cressida, which appealed to my present mood much more—but I cannot wait ten days for my Cressid, either. Yet well may I have to. You must be bound to fly from me, in horror.’
This passage was a subtle signal for a sense of gloom. It came to him, as he licked the flap of the envelope, that his cause was utterly hopeless.
Shall I even send it her, he wondered; yet sat writing her name even as he spoke aloud. Miss Mason, 66 Brook Green, London, W6.
He watched it dry, deciding, ‘I’ll go out now, and pop it in her letter-box myself.’
He went and got the parcel from under the sink.
He walked slowly, still half undecided about the whole thing. He was not afraid of the consequences, were she to hand his letter straight to the police; it was not that. It was deeper than that. He was merely afraid that, in her judgment of him, she might decide it was also his punishment to die alone, without the consolation of seeing her once again, and savouring the aura which surrounded her, an aura which could be likened only to spiritual Lilies of the Valley. It was as if God lowered her down on a long string every so often; her face was naturally a bit frozen and pinched, and her nose a bit red, it was so cold up there: but you got a whiff of her, and you knew at once where she had come from. You thought:
‘Lilies of the Valley! How wonderful!’ And you wanted to stop with her for always.
… Nobody stopped him when he walked out of the Heights, whistling Hot Sock Roleson. The night porter was sunk into the lounge sofa, his white head thrown back in abandon, legs and arms outstretched like a dropped puppet, and his mouth wide open. Mr Bowling did not look in the direction of the late Mr Farthing’s shop, and he did not allow himself to think: ‘I wonder I have not had visitors before this; one would imagine a flat to flat visit, surely? Or at least detectives at the entrance here?’ He felt just a little unnerved, as he passed through the curtains. It would have been inconvenient to have been stopped and asked: ‘’Ere, you—where’d you think you’re going? What’s in that parcel?’ It would be awful to be stopped before he had got the note to Miss Mason, even though he was not sure he was going to deliver it to Miss Mason. In the same way, it did matter about being found with the suit, and it didn’t. One couldn’t tell yet. He just had it in mind to get rid of it, whereas, in another mood, he wouldn’t have bothered at all. And, by the way, where to put it? … It had not occurred to him that, vast though London is, its eyes are vaster, and there simply is nowhere you can shove a suit which has blood on it, short of a furnace, but Mr Bowling hadn’t got a furnace.
When he reached Miss Mason’s, the suit was still under his arm.
Dawn was just beginning to shove out sleepy grey arms, and to push a slightly pink face from beneath the blankets. It yawned and its misty breath was blackish and chilly. Then a distinctly red nose sat bolt upright over Hammersmith way.
Mr Bowling, after many hesitations, found the letter box, took a very deep breath and popped his letter in. He was just thinking: ‘Well, I’ve done it now, that’s that,’ and regretting that he had forgotten to put By Hand in the top left hand corner, in the way he had been brought up to do, when he was considerably astonished to hear a footstep behind him.
‘God morning,’ said Miss Mason in very matter-of-fact tones.
He was astounded.
> Speechless with shyness, it was only after several seconds of staring eagerly at her, that he remembered that there was a war on.
Miss Mason, getting out her latch key, was saying that she had been on part time duty at a shelter, not saying which shelter, or what she had been on duty for, thereby leaving him to choose between the Red Cross or the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, for he was perfectly sure that she was an administering angel of some kind.
He felt extremely foolish, being caught at such an hour, and heard himself mumbling apologies. He said, no, he would not dream of coming in at such an hour, it would be most inconvenient, he knew, and might be thought improper were anyone to observe them.
‘I am thinking of you,’ he said, longing to come in, as a tramp longs for warmth and sanctuary, but staying firmly on the doorstep.
Miss Mason explained that the girls lived their own lives here entirely, and were free to come and go, or to have men visitors to meals in their room, any old thing like that. She was bright and sounded so nice. She didn’t look too bad in the morning light. She had a hat which rather tended to shoot upwards in a peculiar way, but he thought, on the whole, hats suited her. She had given him a small hand which was a bit chapped. It felt as if somebody had put into his fist a sugar mouse, like the things one used to eat as kids.
He heard himself saying that he had only tootled along to leave a note for her, ‘though, you may think it odd of me, Miss Mason,’ he faltered.
She said at once:
‘No, I don’t, why should I?’ and it sounded as if she had been expecting him to come at that very hour.
‘How nice of you to say that,’ he said.
‘I would like it if you would come in?’ she said. ‘Won’t you?’
He said, no, he really wouldn’t, but he found himself standing once again in her little room where the crucifix was, and he heard himself saying: ‘No, I won’t sit down, this is too bad of me’ even as he sat on the sofa and put his parcel beside him.
Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper Page 18