The Last Best Friend

by George Sims

  Balfour turned to leave the room but Gerrard called out: ‘Don’t forget. It was an accident, Weiss’s death. Not murder.’

  Balfour said contemptuously: ‘Don’t tell me. It’s the police you’ll have to convince.’

  Chapter XX

  In the taxi from Seymour Street, Balfour felt as though he was suffering from a fever. The excitement, the revelations and the continuing tension of the day had proved too much for him, resulting in a kind of nervous crisis—his hands trembled, his head ached and his face was hot.

  Gazing out at familiar streets he could hardly recognize them—everything was unreal—it was as though he had lost all sense of orientation or was being driven through a nightmare world in which places were arbitrarily moved or changed. He looked on the Saturday evening strolling crowds with a jaundiced eye and the impression that he had been cut off finally from such normal pleasures. It was the confrontation that lay before him at Carlos Place that had finally brought on this mental malady: in his mind’s eye there was always the tableau of Gerrard squatting on his haunches, his face contorted in a rictus of hatred, mouth agape to speak the fateful three words.

  As the taxi pulled up at some traffic lights he noticed two young couples laughing in front of a florist’s window and regarded their gaiety with a cold critical eye as if he was a visitor from another planet.

  Even Carlos Place looked unfamiliar and when the taxi stopped the driver had to turn round saying ‘O.K. Here we are then’ before Balfour got out. As he did so, the muscles round his solar plexus contracted and he wondered if he would be sick. While the taxi disappeared he stood looking across at the Connaught Hotel, waiting until a little of the tension drained away.

  Pressing the door bell by the Padauk door he said aloud unbelievingly, ‘Three days ago!’ It seemed incredible that it was Wednesday that he had come to this door making an apologetic entrance, greeting Phyl with a kiss and asking his naïve questions of Max about Sammy. For a moment he felt giddy and the world seemed topsy-turvy—nothing made sense and anything might happen.

  The heavy door opened slowly and he saw Phyl Weber. This time she did not offer her cheek to be kissed but shrank away with a startled expression as if he might hit her. He could see that she had been crying and knew that Gerrard must have phoned. She looked old and ill. With one hand she clenched a scrap of lace and with the other made a small tentative gesture of despair. Without a word he walked past her and the stone inscription which now had such an ironical ring: LET EACH MAN TAKE UP HIS CHISEL AND INSCRIBE HIS OWN FATE.

  He had thought of many bitter things to say to Phyl but they had vanished on seeing her. She was super-sensitive, her emotions always near to the surface, and these events must have already had a terrible effect on her—and she had been only an unwilling spectator, unable to affect the outcome.

  ‘Where’s Max?’ he said, without turning to look at her.

  ‘Oh Ned! I wanted to talk to you. Max isn’t here. You must let me explain. You must understand—you know that Max wouldn’t…He was sickened by what happened.’

  Balfour turned, shaking his head sadly. ‘I know exactly what happened, and I do understand, I’m afraid. Max’s reputation, his possessions, his fabulous career were at stake. Obviously nothing could be allowed…’

  Phyl intervened: ‘But Sammy was trying to make him a scapegoat for all he had suffered in the past. Max was just an art expert, not a member of the Death’s Head SS.’

  Balfour ignored her repetition of Gerrard’s argument, continuing as if she had not spoken: ‘Max’s career would have been finished, he might even have had to go back and stand trial for the offences he had committed. And his attempt to bribe Sammy failed. So naturally, those thugs were turned loose to terrorize…Do you know the supreme irony of the whole thing? Sammy hadn’t even made up his mind about denouncing Max. Yes, it’s true! He sent me a cable in Corsica saying that he wanted my advice on his “terrible decision”. You see? But of course Max could not take a chance. And now Sammy’s dead.’ Balfour walked on towards the stairs saying in a loud voice: ‘Where’s Max? Is he hiding up there?’

  ‘Wait, Ned. Talk to me—please. I told you Max isn’t here.’

  Balfour nodded like a mechanical doll. ‘I know. But you lied to me the last time I was here.’

  He ran up the stairs and went along the landing, opening all the doors and finding the rooms dark and empty.

  There was another flight of stairs leading to the Weber’s private apartment, and he had begun to climb these when he heard noises in the hall below. Voices raised in argument, in particular Phyl’s, sounding shrill and hysterical. Then another, louder noise as if the ebony and bronze door had been flung back jarringly against the wall. Physical violence of any kind was not like Max, and Balfour was puzzled. He went back to the top of the first flight of stairs.

  Victor Maddox, one of his young toughs, and another man, tall and lean, were standing there arguing with Phyl—Maddox underlining some point by jabbing his finger at her. Balfour shouted: ‘Don’t do that!’

  Maddox looked up and called out: ‘Why, it’s friend Balfour! Now you come down here. We’ve just been round to Seymour Street and found you had beaten us to it. So come along down, friend Balfour. I’ve got someone else for you to play with.’

  He indicated the third man, lantern-jawed, in a navy serge suit a size too small for him, who was standing about aimlessly with his hands in his pockets. Maddox put both hands in a proprietary manner on the tall man’s shoulders and shouted to Balfour, ‘Yes, just nip down and punch this lad in the stomach.’ He urged the man up the wide stairs and the two of them advanced step by step together.

  Balfour hesitated for a moment. His brain dictated that he should run into Max’s office, lock the door, phone the police—logical action was quite plain. But anger was welling up in him—when Maddox had shaken his finger at Phyl, Balfour again visualized him forcing Sammy through the window. He shook his head as though to clear it and took a step down. Phyl Weber called out his name in a shaky, frightened voice but he was deaf to warnings now and blind to his surroundings. The only rational thinking he was capable of informed his fighting instinct. The tall blue-suited man held his hands low and his stance was the contemptuous one adopted by veteran boxers in fair-ground booths. Balfour felt sure that he would soon go down before those long wiry arms and practised fists. ‘Thrice armed is he who gets his blow in fust.’ He threw himself down the stairs, cannoning off the banisters and swinging a left haymaker at Maddox’s big, congested face, using all his strength as if he was trying to fell a tree.

  The punch seemed to explode in Maddox’s neck but the next moment Balfour went down under a torrent of blows—so many that he did not know where they were landing or who was hitting him. He continued to descend the stairs, but in ridiculous slow motion, and it was a dream like effortless activity. He lost consciousness without being aware of pain, as though he had been given a shot of Pentothal. There was an ever more distant voice calling his name over and over again, followed by a roaring noise in his ears that increased in volume until it became nearly unbearable, then nothing.

  ***

  Balfour woke reluctantly to the moaning of tugs and the fainter sound of water slapping and washing against timbers. First the noises and then pallid light broke through his protective barrier. He returned to life with a deep feeling of distaste, it was like wakening from a nightmare to find that all its worst events turned out to be true. He lay quite still for a while going over the sordid hours which had led up to the drugging sleep.

  When he twisted his neck slightly to see where the light came from he found it was stiff and sore. His ribs ached and responded to any movement like a devilish waistcoat devised by a torturer. Very slowly he got up into a sitting position. He had been lying on the floor close to the door of a narrow office. On his left there was a row of steel filing cabinets, to the right a typist’s desk an
d chair and a window lit by the moon.

  It was a disturbing feeling coming back to consciousness in utterly strange surroundings. He remembered a scene from war-time Italy: they had been going in convoy to cross the River Volturno above Caserta on the first of his few days of really active service. Forced to stop at an exposed point where the shelling was heavy, he had looked out and seen a G.I., an infantry sergeant, who grinned at him. Then the sergeant had nodded, waved a hand in the direction of the gunfire and called out ‘Kinda scary, eh kid?’ This simple acknowledgement of their common feeling had stayed with him since and the trivial incident had borne him up in a few subsequent moments of fear. Now he said aloud, ‘Kind of scary, eh kid?’ but it sounded like someone else mimicking his voice and the words echoed and buzzed in his ears.

  A glance from the window showed him that he was in a building overhanging the Thames. He could easily pinpoint its position as he practically faced Billingsgate with Tower Bridge on his right hand and London Bridge to the left: one of the wharves off Tooley Street. Then a vignette flashed into his mind—the day when he had been standing on London Bridge and noticed the impressive Toller, Cato building near Hay’s Wharf. He was a prisoner in it now.

  He looked along to the right at a ship partly hidden by a series of cranes, then gazed down to estimate how high he was above the river. Light was streaming from a window on the floor below him nearer to the side of the building. He was four floors up, perhaps fifty feet. Patiently searching the area below he saw a measure, like a giant perpendicular ruler, affixed to the end of one of the wharves, giving the depth of water up to twenty-one feet. It showed only the numbers above seventeen. Fifty feet into, say, sixteen feet of water. He had jumped from a greater height at Praiano for a hundred lire bet. Here the stakes were all-important and he had nothing to lose by not attempting it. He went to the door, tried the lock and listened intently. There was a good deal of distant argument, voices rising and falling.

  When he went back to the window he carefully scanned the surface of the dark water. At Praiano he had been able to see exactly what lay below him. Here there might be a wooden platform or steps covered by the high tide. There was no guarantee that he would not hurtle down on to a hidden concrete slope. In a minute he might easily kill himself and so provide a ready solution for those who had brought him to Tooley Street. He took off his jacket, shoes and socks then padded back to the door once more and heard Max shout in an enraged voice: ‘Now just go back again and bring Mr Cato with you. Nothing’s to be done till he is here.’ There was the noise of a door slamming and two or three people running downstairs.

  When he was balanced on the window ledge, crouching awkwardly, Balfour had a giddy feeling as if he was already falling—the helpless sensation of vertigo which he had never experienced properly before. The water’s surface, black with oily glints, seemed to shift suddenly, then race up to meet him.

  He hung back from the edge, unable to summon up the will to jump. It was his injured right arm that worried him—it would affect his balance and confidence. But there was something else—the height and the dark indefinite surface had a strange hypnotic effect as if they were willing him on to another purpose. Hanson had said that vertigo had been explained as the tension between the desire to fall and the dread of falling. Had Sammy, on the towering ledge, been tempted by death, the last best friend? The endless embrace, offering oblivion and release from the remorse that Sammy felt for his parents and sisters left behind to be butchered at Auschwitz.

  Balfour sprang forward unsteadily and felt himself falling slightly backwards in the descent so that he entered the water as if he had come off a chute, struggling and sinking down in an ungainly fashion until his left foot hit the slippery mud bottom of the river. When he broke the surface he was choking and spitting but the water was not unduly foul. He lay on his back, kicking his legs up and down and paddling with one hand, making slow progress like an elderly gentleman bather till he reached some slimy steps.

  Walking gingerly along the pitted concrete surface of the wharf on bare feet, Balfour felt better than he had done for several hours. The tension had gone, leaving him quite calm. He took some deep breaths of the fresh night air and stared up into the starlit sky, wryly remembering the last time he had looked at it—with Bunty. How absurd a picture he would make through some celestial telescope, shivering in his clinging wet shirt and trousers, a puny stupid figure trying to redress a squalid crime with yet more violence.

  When he had opened the side door to the Toller, Cato warehouse he stood quite still in the shadowy hallway listening carefully in case Maddox had left the youth or his reserve bruiser behind, but the building was dark and quiet.

  He found Max Weber on the third floor, seated at a large desk with two telephones. Max had a fixed expression of profound despair, like a psychotic, and seemed to be rooted there, lacking the will to move. He showed no surprise at Balfour’s sudden and slightly comic appearance, simply letting his arms fall as Balfour locked the door behind him and saying: ‘And so—it comes to this.’

  Balfour stared at him for a few moments with a feeling of bitterness which was directed partly at himself. ‘You know, Max, for a little while I had a cruel idea. I wanted to force you out of a window—to give you a taste of the terror that Sammy must have gone through. You may not have wanted him to die but you were quite willing to employ those thugs. You’re a selfish bastard, indifferent to everyone else. I just hope I can learn a lesson from you. And now—I’m going to make Sammy’s phone call for him.’

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