He put his foot harder on the accelerator.
The car shot forward obediently.
One quick look back. The discreetly gay blue door open. The Bosun standing there. A glimpse of a gun in his hand. But the corner cut him off.
He was safe.
Roger woke up next morning to find thin sunshine with a hint of spring in it dappling the buff wallpaper opposite the bed. He lay quietly letting the pattern of events form piece by piece in his mind.
This was a hotel in Cork. He had forgotten its name if he had ever noticed it. The bed was not very comfortable. He had driven all the day before, sending the bulbous American car smoothly along almost any road that presented itself before him. By the time he reached Cork in the evening its shiny black paintwork was covered in a veil of fine dust.
The bars of pale sunlight moving slowly across the buff anonymity of the wallpaper.
Roger fell into a doze. His mind wandering here and there, picking up a piece of information, toying with it and letting it drop.
And suddenly he realized what he had been thinking. He sat bolt upright in the hard bed. Two minutes concentrated endeavour to make sure that he had not been imagining things. Then out of bed, quickly into his clothes and downstairs.
He looked about. On the left a pair of frosted glass doors with the words ‘Residents’ Lounge’ painted on them. He went quickly in. A writing table. A rack in stained oak. Hotel notepaper. He took a sheet, sat down and began to write.
My dear Bosun,
I am afraid you will have to go back to Leeds and forget about my existence. You see, I know now who the Infiltraitor really was. You must have been delighted when I got it into my head that it was the girl I am in love with.
Oddly enough I have known the real answer almost all along. Only a curious circumstance, which will doubtless appeal to the psychologist in you, prevented me from realizing that I had the key to the whole business in my hand from the start. I experienced a classical Freudian blockage of memory over it.
As you will know, the very word ‘Leeds’ was bound to be one that my mind would reject. My whole experience there was something of which I was profoundly ashamed. And it was this word which was the clue to the whole thing. No one in Ireland except the Infiltraitor knew I had ever worked at Leeds, so that if someone mentioned it to me they were bound to be the person I was looking for. But when they did say it I was unable to realize that they had.
Obviously what now allows me to remember hearing the word was the terrific mental upheaval which you were kind enough to put me through. It completely exorcised the blockage of memory over Leeds. So it was no surprise to find, when I woke up a few minutes ago, that – to use a phrase which I think comes from the great William James – the key word had ‘strolled back into my consciousness’.
It was said to me in the library at the School. I can quote the exact context and I bet a tape recorder, if one had been preserving that very trivial conversation, would prove me right. This is the very phrase: ‘I wouldn’t have thought someone who’s worked at Leeds would find a historical subject all that interesting.’ It was spoken, of course, by that profound bore George Wyndham. He promptly followed it up by offering to take over my present philological work. I suppose the great rage that came over me then was really caused by my mind refusing to deal with the word ‘Leeds’. Anyhow I forgot his remark entirely – until this morning.
In the light of it I now see, too, that it was Wyndham who tipped you off that I was at that absurd meeting of Austin Boycott’s. Wyndham was a member of the audience, but at the time that did not surprise me: it was just the sort of occasion he would turn up at, just as he turned up at your presentation and gave you a willing tool at the very moment you found you needed one.
No, of course you did not need to bribe him. All he wanted was the feeling that he was moving in inner places. He improved quite a bit under your tuition, too. The way he created a huff for himself at Boycott’s meeting so that he could get out to telephone you was decidedly astute. I hope you will continue to find him a useful colleague.
Because you are going to have him as a colleague for a long time to come, unless of course you prefer to turn him over to the police. That is going to be your punishment: to have that monumental bore with you at Leeds as long as you are there to give him a job. Otherwise I shall blow the gaff.
Yours permanently,
Roger Farrar.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © H. R. F. Keating, 1962
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ISBN: 9781448206711
eISBN 9781448206353
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The Dog It Was That Died Page 22