‘People? What people?’
‘Oh, any people, anybody that—that just asks.’ But now when they did ask she would remember this, she would know that something had happened last night. ‘It’s—something to do with the Party,’ he blurted out wretchedly. ‘You’ll only get me into trouble if you go talking.’ But that wasn’t wise either; for when it came she would know that it was nothing to do with the Party at all. ‘Anyway, Mother—this telephone call: what did she really say?’
‘She just said she’d ring again at seven,’ said Mrs. Jones, subdued.
And she rang at seven. ‘Damien? It’s me. Look, I must see you.…’
‘No, no, Melissa, I think it’s much better to—just to keep apart.’
‘Has anything happened—to you, I mean? The police or anything?’
‘Look here, do be careful, this thing may be tapped or something.’
‘I know, that’s why I think we ought to meet and talk. I’ll be at the corner of Elgin Avenue, at eight.’
‘Won’t you be followed?’ said Damien. Mr. Hervey passed him and stumped up the narrow staircase rather wearily after his heavy round of insurance collecting. ‘Look, I’m standing in the hall with half the world listening-in. All right, I’ll be there, if you think it’s safe.’ It sounded like a boy scout game, it sounded like a gangster film, and yet it was all true enough, real enough, horrible enough—he, Damien, who yesterday had been just an ordinary person, afraid now to go out and meet a girl ‘on the corner’ lest they be dogged by the police.
‘I’ve been out to this call-box three times and nobody’s followed me. Nobody suspects me or anything, it’ll be all right. I’ll say I’m taking Gabriel for his walk.’
So he crept out after supper, limping along in the just-too-tight shoes and there she was, waiting for him on the corner, with the little black poodle dancing about her, her eyes huge, her face pale, the hair with its threads of pure gold in the lamplight, falling forward over her cheek. They walked up the little rise into Hamilton Terrace and sat on the wooden bench outside the church. They talked in half whispers. It was very dark and still. ‘Haven’t the police been to your house at all, Damien?’ ‘No, why should they—unless you went and said …’ ‘I haven’t mentioned your name, Damien, I haven’t breathed to a soul that you were there at all, last night.’ ‘What did they say to you, Melissa, about yourself?’ ‘They just asked me where I’d spent the evening and I said I was with a—a friend of mine.’ ‘Won’t they try to find the friend?’ ‘No, I—I told them I didn’t know his name, I said he was kind of a pick-up and I had no idea where he lived and all that, and not even his surname. I said I came in—some time, I couldn’t remember when, I got muddled up, but finally I just said “some time”; and that after a bit I heard a noise in the hall—and that was the first I knew about it.’ She pushed her lock of hair back and, in the pale lamplight, looked him in the eyes. ‘You do know that I—well, that I went up before that, Damien?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘Better not say anything about it, don’t even put it into words; not now, not ever.’
Silence fell. Their white young faces stared through the lamplit darkness, they sat, tense and immobile, except for the nervous restlessness of their hands. All her silliness and affectation had fallen away from her, she was afraid, and in the reality of her stark fear, the reality of herself shone through. ‘What shall I do now, Damien? Anything?’
‘No, don’t do anything, just keep quiet, just say nothing. Why do anything if they don’t suspect?’
‘But if they ask me any more questions?’
‘Stick to what you’ve said. Be as vague as you can, so that they can’t pin you down, like saying that you came in “some time”, that was fine. But anything you do say, stick to it, that’s all.’
‘It seems simple when you’re here,’ said Melissa, wistfully. ‘But things crop up out of the blue. And it does sound fishy to say I was walking about with—with my friend—all that time in the fog.’
‘Millions of people were walking about in the fog; once you’d started you got lost and just sort of crept around trying to find the way. Couldn’t you have said that you went to a cinema?’
‘I nearly did, but then I thought they’d ask me what film I saw and I might get caught out. As you say, it’s better to just be vague. Nobody can prove that we weren’t just walking about in a fog.’
‘Unless this friend turns up,’ said Damien, uneasily.
‘He won’t,’ said Melissa, more or less assured.
People drifted past, exercising dogs, to the great chagrin of Gabriel, pulling excitedly on his lead. ‘I’d better go now, Damien; I could have walked round the block by now.’ She stood up and shook back her lock of hair. ‘You’d better not even come back down the hill with me, in case.’ She said, abruptly: ‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Damien, standing with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He turned and started off at once, limping along Hamilton Terrace, shoulders hunched. After a minute she came running after him, the poodle towing her along gaily, on its scarlet lead. ‘Damien! Half a minute!’ She caught up with him. ‘I just wanted to say—thank you, Damien.’ She touched him humbly on the sleeve and turned and was towed away off down the hill; her hair gleamed gold for a moment as she passed under the corner lamp.
Ye Gods! ‘Thank you,’ thought Damien, bitterly. Talk about understatements!
Sergeant Bedd picked up the receiver in Thomas’s office. ‘Yes?’
‘Could I speak to Miss Rosie Evans, please?’
‘’Oo is it speaking?’ said Bedd, in a butlerish voice.
‘Oh, er—just say John Brown, will you?’
‘A Mr. John Brown is a-mouldering on the telephone for you, Miss,’ said Bedd, ushering Rosie into the office and returning quietly to lift the receiver of the extension in the hall.
Rosie rushed all excited to the telephone. ‘Hallo? Oh, gosh, Stanislas—I thought it might be you.’
‘Can you meet me again, Rosie—round by the telephone box, eh?’
‘My dear, I don’t think I can. Haven’t you seen the papers?’
‘The papers?’ said the disembodied voice, blankly.
‘Good lord, it’s in all the evening papers, the place has been absolutely swarming with reporters and things. Well, while we were—you know, round by the telephone box last night, a chap got killed here, in our house, somebody came in and hit him with a mastoid mallet.…’
‘With a what? What on earth are you talking about?’
‘It’s in the Evening Standard, you can look for yourself. It was while I was at Tedward’s, well, that’s where I was going when I ran into you in the fog; well, while I was there a man rang up and said somebody had killed him and, my dear, when we came rushing round, sure enough there he was, lying dead on the floor in our hall.’
‘My dear girl, have you been having one over the eight?’
‘You just look in the papers, that’s all. I expect the morning ones will be frantic. But, I say, Stanislas, the peculiar thing is that when the police asked Melissa where she’d spent the evening, she told them she’d been out all the time with you.’
‘With me?’ said the voice, alarmed.
‘Yes, with you. Of course I haven’t told her about you and me running into each other like that and being so silly and naughty, because my dear you must admit we were most terribly silly and naughty, and then discovering that all the time you were Melissa’s famous Stanislas. But then to my utter astonishment, she trotted forth that she’d spent the whole evening till half-past nine wandering about in the fog with you. What a liar, isn’t she?’
‘How very queer,’ said the voice, obviously not liking it one bit. There was a pause. ‘I say, Rosie—did she give my name?’
‘Only “Stanislas”. None of us knows the rest.’
‘No, so you don’t, do you?’ said Stanislas, much relieved. There was a further short pause. ‘Well, good-bye, Rosie; thanks for the buggy ride—it was wonderful as lo
ng as it lasted.’ The line went dead and in the hall Sergeant Bedd softly put the receiver back. ‘Well, gosh!—what a so-and-so,’ said Rosie—not referring to Sergeant Bedd.
And upstairs in the big bed-sitting-room with the dear old, stuffy, stodgy Victorian furniture from home, and the high brass double bedstead and the lovely bits of old china and glass, Tedward sat with old Mrs. Evans sipping a cup of after-dinner coffee and watching her steadily from under his bushy eyebrows. Mrs. Evans was in tremendous fettle. Seduced and deserted, Madonna Lily was now galloping back across the desert in pursuit of her errant knight (‘Black but comely, dear Tedward, black but comely!’), hotly pursued in her turn by yet another Sheik, obviously up to no good. ‘He’s gaining on us, he’s gaining on us!’ cried Mrs. Evans, applying jewelled spurs to the sofa, flaying the air with an ebony and ivory whip. ‘We must abandon the caravan, leave a few trusted men with the camel train and press on, press on! Jettison the jewels, the spices, leave my carved rosewood palanquin by the bleak wayside to be silted over by the silver sand.…’ She paused for a moment, struck by this impromptu gem of alliteration and Tedward could almost have sworn that she winked at him; but in a moment she was at the window, jettisoning jewels and spices till the whole room was denuded of cushions. Tedward helpfully passed over his coffee cup, but this nice little piece of Limoges china was evidently too insignificant to hamper flight very seriously and she ignored it. ‘He’s catching up with us, he’s gaining on us!’ Madonna Lily was obviously marked up for a double dose of Worse than Death and Tedward, waiting a little apprehensively for his sedative to work, reflected that perhaps with luck it might be followed by another day of tranquil remorse which, in the shock and strain of their present regime, would be all to the good all round. But the pursuer caught up with Madonna Lily and—swept past. ‘It’s Edwin!’ cried Mrs. Evans, falling on her knees with clasped hands, without troubling first to dismount from her Arab steed. ‘It’s Edwin who has loved me so steadily for so long. He has drawn his burnous across his face, but I know that brow, I know those eyes.’ She found herself back in the saddle again and her thin old fingers, noded like bamboo stems, were clasped low on the flowing mane as she set off again at the heels of her avenger. ‘Edwin! Edwin!’ But the dose was beginning to take effect at last. The sofa began to slow down, she dropped her hands heavily into her lap, her eyelids began to droop. ‘I must let him go on alone. I know the end. He will overtake my betrayer and there, alone in the desert, with the great storm of sand blowing up about them.…’ She began to nod; straightened up with a jerk; drooped again. ‘I’m so sorry, Tedward, dear. I feel so stupid and sleepy, I wonder if you would excuse me now. I think I’ll go to bed. It was very nice of you to come and spend half an hour with a dotty old woman like me.’ She jerked back her head once more and looked at him beadily. ‘I hope I haven’t been talking too much nonsense? I read so much, I sometimes get mixed up in my books, and all my ideas go skew-wiff.’
‘It’s only your wig that’s skew-wiff this time,’ said Tedward; his big, kind hands gently put it straight for her and he went out on to the lawn to pick up the cushions.
And next morning one, Stanley Breeks, a young gentleman, with too few hairs in his little moustache and too many spots on the back of his little neck, slipped over the channel (his passport was all quite in order) there to hang about rather bored and miserable in spite of being Abroad, till his mingy allowance should be all gone. Best to keep out of the way, thought Stan Breeks, sicking up dreadfully into the heaving sea; a woman scorned was indeed a terrible thing—and then, damn it all, getting mixed up in a murder.…! But the truth was that though one’s family might have educated one to be a gent, thus breeding in one a magnificent contempt for one’s origins, there they were still in the background all the time, and one had to put up with them because of cheques and things. And really one could not stand the thought of their ignorant mockery, their robustious ‘teasing’, their crude, vulgar laughter (for one’s sisters had not benefited from a similar education) when it should be discovered that one had posed ‘in the West End’ as ‘just Stanislas’: Stanislas the exciting, the mysterious, the elusive, the highly born. ‘Count Stanislas Breeks’ his old dad would call him, banging him lustily upon the shoulder with an odorous hand—for Breeks senior had made, and still made, his pile in fish, and was not so ashamed of it as to be very particular about removing its unattractive trademark; and ‘Stan, Stan, the flash in the pan’ his common, bouncing, insensitive sisters would cry, dancing round the breakfast table ‘jollying him along’—before he had even had his cup of tea and slice of lemon and his ‘special’ bit of toast. No thank you! That little ass, Melissa, had been quite fun, impressed and admiring, and Rosie had been a gorgeous armful and goodness knew, not backward in coming forward considering that they’d never set eyes on one another before they collided in the fog, night before last; but it wasn’t worth it, there were lots more girls in France and Dad, who was so naïvely proud of his roving, imperious son, was quite ready to cough up the dibs so that he might (with one of his sudden strokes of swift decision) go off to complete his education ‘on the Continong’. So Stan departed by the afternoon boat and Mr. Charlesworth’s easy assurance of soon laying hands on him, did not come off; and Rosie and Melissa were left to their indignation and their memories. Their memories, at least, were pleasant. Melissa had not been in a position to be choosey and Rosie, in the fog, had never observed the scantiness of whisker or the profusion of spots. The mysterious Stanislas threw his dark cloak about him and melted back into the nothingness from which he had come; and that was that.
There had been another murder and the forfeit for both murders had been paid, before Stan Breeks showed his horrid little face in England again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MR. CHARLESWORTH thought that one might as well trundle down and have a chat with Littlejohn, the path. man, over the post-mortem and, like one small boy inviting another to a party, suggested that Inspector Cockrill might like to come too. Cockie agreed without enthusiasm and, nursing his enormous hat on his knees, sat back in the little black police car and was duly trundled down to the mortuary. Raoul Vernet had been degutted and was now lying, looking rather like an outsize tin soldier except that he was stark naked, in a sort of very shallow, grooved porcelain bath, his toes turned up, his hands tumbled loosely at his sides; he looked a little grey and there were ugly blue bulges beneath his shoulders and thighs where the blood had slowly collected after death, but otherwise he looked peaceful and at rest, lying serenely to attention there. A straight line of large black stitches ran up his stomach and chest but his rather fuzzy, sparse black hair had been carefully arranged, with the mortuary brush and comb, to cover his broken skull. Dr. Littlejohn had his liver and lights in enamel trays and was fastidiously turning them over with a forceps point. ‘Nothing here, of course. He died from the fracture of the skull, resultant cerebral lacerations, etcetera, etcetera.’ He went off into a highly technical description of the wounds and what might be deduced from them. ‘O.K., O.K.,’ said Charlesworth. ‘We get you. He died from a single whack over the coconut probably while he was leaning forward a bit, or at any rate with his head bent forward; and his assailant was standing behind him, a little to his right. Yep?’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ said Littlejohn. ‘I’ll get it all nicely written down on a form for you and of course the high ding-a-dings will want to pronounce, but that’s what it amounts to.’
‘Said assailant being either man, woman or child?’
‘Well, not a tot. Said assailant would have to be fairly tall to get a good swing on said instrument; unless of course the tot were standing on a chair.’
‘The only tot in the picture so far is aged about two, so we’re not seriously exercised about that. How tall, actually, to do the job?’
‘Oh, any reasonable talth,’ said Littlejohn. ‘It depends whether he leant forward or only bent his head a bit, and I don’t think we shall be able to give a r
uling on that. For the rest, the mallet’s so heavy, and yet so easy to handle, that it wouldn’t take an awful lot of strength. Just pick up the thing and put all you’ve got behind it and—whacko! Of course they were lucky to hit him just where they did.’
‘Or clever,’ suggested Cockie, sombrely.
‘Well, yes, or clever. Only they must have been super-clever to persuade him to adjust his head so accommodatingly.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cockie, standing there in the dreadful antiseptic green and white room, all polished and shining and shadowless and stinking of formaldehyde; his hands thrust into the pockets of his droopy, untidy old mackintosh, hat perched on the back of his head. ‘Yes, indeed.’ And he suddenly lifted his head and his bright brown bird-like eyes were a-shine with excitement. ‘Yes, indeed!’
‘“Most illuminating,”’ quoted Charlesworth to himself. Charlesworth had suffered before from Inspector Cockrill’s flashes of inspiration.
Two mortuary attendants lifted Raoul’s lank figure and wrapped him up in a vast linen sheet. Looking like nothing so much as an oddly-shaped bundle of laundry, he was wheeled away to cold storage. Cockrill had an unsolicited glimpse of other large laundry bundles as the great refrigerator doors were lugged open and Raoul slid, feet first, on to his slatted, metal bunk; three large white bundles and one much smaller one. On a blackboard outside the doors was chalked: ‘One female leg for Prof. Prout.’ He thought to himself that indeed beauty vanishes, beauty passes; one female leg: with a pretty ankle, perhaps, once much admired, with a nimble foot that had stepped lightly, danced charmingly, that had loved the feel of warm, golden sand trickling between the toes—one female leg, lying wrapped up in a frig., like a butcher’s joint, ready for Prof. Prout to practise on.…
‘Well, what do you think of all that?’ said Charlesworth, climbing back into the little car.
‘I think you should find out if one of the suspects possesses a gun,’ said Inspector Cockrill.
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