Fear to Tread

by Michael Gilbert

  “Laughed, did he?” said Mr. Wetherall thoughtfully.

  “Yes. Then he rang off.”

  4

  MORNING AFTER

  Mr. Wetherall went to school on Friday morning with one fixed intention. That was to forget about the events of the last three days.

  The weather was helpful to such resolution. After the fogs and uncertainties of the previous days, it was an autumn morning which could have sat as a model for all autumn mornings. The sun shone down through a layer of mist which filtered the sunbeams into defined and spikey rays. The sky seemed pale and drained of colour. It looked like the background of an Italian religious painting.

  On his desk Mr. Wetherall found a note that Colonel Bond had telephoned and would telephone again. Peggy had added “Received 9.12” and Mr. Wetherall looked uneasily at the message.

  Colonel Bond was a man who had brought to a high pitch the art of putting other people into their places. It was a technique which Mr. Wetherall had often observed in action. It was founded on the tactical principle of never, in any circumstances, giving an opinion of his own. If a question was put to him so directly that it demanded an answer he would say “Well, really!” or “I wouldn’t know” in tones of such haughty surprise that the questioner often apologised for having been so gauche as to put the question at all. Though he still nourished his military title he had not seen khaki since 1919. As well as being a retired colonel he was a retired accountant, a retired J.P. and, at the moment, Chairman of the General Purposes Sub-Committee which, under the direction of the Schools Committee, looked after the affairs of South Borough Secondary School.

  By and large he was about the heaviest cross that Mr. Wetherall had to bear.

  It suddenly occurred to him that the excitements of the past few days had postponed a number of little jobs that he had intended to put in hand before his next meeting with the colonel. There was the revised programme for evening “Supplementaries” – always a ticklish matter; there was the minute on staff discipline (the colonel had encountered one of the junior masters smoking in the corridor); there was the census of boys with unremoved tonsils—

  “A lady to see you,” said Peggy.

  “Oh.”

  “No need to straighten your tie. This girlfriend won’t see seventy again. I put her in the small class-room. She wouldn’t come upstairs. She says it’s important.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Wetherall.

  In the class-room – it was the same one in which he had talked to Luigi – he found old Mrs. Crowdy.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  Mr. Wetherall looked at her stupidly.

  “Fell over a bridge at the main line intersection and broke himself up.”

  Mr. Wetherall battled with the fear that had got hold of him.

  “Peter—?”

  “No. No. Not the boy. His father.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “This morning. He goes off to work at six with the boy. The boy’s back home now. I come straight along—”

  She had come straight along, on her feet. An adventurous journey for an old lady. When in trouble, go to the schoolmaster or the parson.

  “Rent’s paid to the end of the week,” she said, “then we’ll have to move.”

  Mr. Wetherall looked at her helplessly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I shall be all right.” She spoke with the authority of one who has survived for three quarters of a century at the level of bare subsistence. “It’s the boy—”

  “I can give him a bed. For a night or two, anyway. After that I can probably fix something.” It was the sort of arrangement he had had to make more than once before, in the recurrent crises which occurred in the lives of his pupils. “What about family?”

  “I’m all the family he’s got,” said the old lady. “I never heard he had no other. His mother was from Wales. Might be some family there. They’ll take some getting hold of.”

  “That’s all right. I have to ask. I’ve seen trouble caused that way before.” He got a bit of paper and wrote on it: “I, Mrs. – first name’ll do – Amelia Crowdy, being the paternal grandmother and, to the best of my knowledge, the only surviving relative of Peter Crowdy, agree to placing him in the custody of the headmaster of South Borough Secondary School until such time as permanent arrangements can be made for him.”

  He read this out to Mrs. Crowdy who repeated “paternal grandmother” proudly to herself, nodded her head and signed her name with surprising clarity.

  “You know my address,” said Mr. Wetherall. “There, I’ll write it down for you. Tell Peter to get his things together and go straight along. He can take a bus. I’ll telephone my wife.”

  When she had gone he went back to his study. He placed the paper in the Crowdy folder, noticing as he did so the last letter which Mr. Crowdy had sent him and the envelope with the scribbled note on the back “Jock’s Pull-In for Carmen.” In the press of events it had slipped his memory. Now he pulled the envelope out and sat looking at it.

  “Sergeant Donovan,” announced Peggy formally. She spoilt the effect by adding, “Wipe your feet, Patsy, there’s a boy. I just swept the carpet this morning.”

  “Come in, Sergeant. Put the engaged notice up, would you, Peggy.”

  “I shan’t keep you long, I hope.”

  “About Crowdy?”

  Sergeant Donovan turned sharply. Some feeling showed in his eyes.

  “Who told you that, Mr. Wetherall?”

  “I had old Mrs. Crowdy round here just now. Poor old soul. She says she can look after herself. I’ve taken the boy off her hands till we can fix something.”

  “I see.” Sergeant Donovan sounded disconcerted. He had come to say something, to take a certain line with Mr. Wetherall, and he was out of his stride.

  “Was it an accident?”

  “I suppose you could walk over a three foot parapet if you had enough on your mind.”

  “What sort of thing do you mean?”

  “That’s something I hoped you might be able to tell me,” said Sergeant Donovan, “seeing you’ve been twice to his house lately.”

  “Three times,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I was there last night, too.”

  “Ah. Were you now.” Something which, by a stretch of the imagination, might have been the beginning of a grin broke the grim face. “You wouldn’t by any chance have been the talkative gentleman that Timmins saw back to his bus about half-past ten.”

  “I was not aware—”

  “Highly instructive, I’m given to understand. It’s all in his book. You didn’t know that policemen were authors, did you? Everything that happens to them, big or little, it all goes into the book. Makes funny reading sometimes.”

  “No doubt,” said Mr. Wetherall stiffly.

  “Well now, what did you and Mr. Crowdy find to talk about?”

  “Let me ask you a question for a change. Why are you interested in Crowdy?”

  “We’re always interested in people who get themselves killed.” The smile gapped again.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Wetherall. “But he hadn’t been killed last night. Were you watching him? How did you know I’d been to see him?”

  “Peggy told me.”

  Mr. Wetherall considered. He didn’t believe it. But it was just conceivable that it was true.

  “All right,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I’ll tell you about it. I first went to see Crowdy on the night of the boxing – that was Wednesday night. I went to tell him that I’d fixed up a job for Peter – that’s the boy. He threw me out. For absolutely no reason at all, that I could see. He wouldn’t have schoolmasters snooping and prying round his house. That sort of thing. I thought at the time he was drunk. I don’t think so now. I believe he was frightened.”

  “Ah,” said Sergent Donovan. “Yes.”

  “Next day Peter didn’t turn up at school. There was some cock-and-bull story about him having chicken-pox. I went round in the afternoon to find
out about it. There was only old Mrs. Crowdy in. She said come in the evening, so I went round again, after I’d made a few inquiries about him first.” He told Sergeant Donovan about Bill Fisher and Jock’s Pull-In for Carmen. He omitted any mention of his own panicky conduct, but otherwise he gave him a fair account of it all. “That was last night. I saw Mr. Crowdy. There was no mistake about it that time. He was drunk.”

  “Did he have anything to say for himself? It’s a thing people do sometimes when they’re drunk – talk.”

  “Nothing very sensible. He talked in a general way about the dangers of stepping off the straight and narrow path. He might have meant something, or he might just have been philosophising.”

  “That’s another thing they do when they’re tight,” agreed Sergeant Donovan non-committally.

  “Now look here,” said Mr. Wetherall. He tried to remind himself that the formidable person in front of him had once, not so very long ago, been a boy to whom he had taught the dates of the Kings and Queens of England. “I insist on knowing what this is all about.”

  Sergeant Donovan got up.

  “You asked me if I thought it was an accident,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “If it was an accident, all I can say is it’s not the sort I want happening to me.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think Harry Crowdy fell off that bridge, Mr. Wetherall. Experienced rail men don’t fall off bridges – even if it’s a bit dark or slippery, and a mist about. Nor I don’t think that the train which went over him afterwards did all the damage. I think he was thrown over. And if you want the truth, Mr. Wetherall, I think he was broken up before he was thrown.”

  “Broken up,” repeated Mr. Wetherall stupidly.

  “A pick helve or a spade,” said Sergeant Donovan. “Not nice,” he added, as he walked over to the window.

  Mr. Wetherall said nothing. He was thinking of Mr. Crowdy, as he had seen him the night before, red-faced, stupid, well-meaning, drunk – frightened.

  “Why would anyone do that?” he said at last.

  “They’re a nasty crowd,” said Sergeant Donovan. “I’d say they’re the nastiest we’ve seen in England for some time. And when money’s the object, they aren’t going to pull their punches. But all the same, I can’t see them doing a thing like that to a harmless old packet like Crowdy unless – well, unless they thought he was stooling.”

  “Stooling?”

  “Informing. There’s almost nothing they wouldn’t do to an informer.”

  II

  “This is Fawcus,” said Colonel Bond. “We hope to persuade him to join our committee. He’s had a lot of experience of educational problems.”

  Mr. Fawcus was a small pink man with grey hair, very neatly parted, and rimless glasses. Mr. Wetherall shook hands with him warily and asked “Where – for your sins – did you teach?”

  “I have never—ah—actually taught at a school,” admitted Mr. Fawcus, “but I have had a certain amount of experience of them. I was for many years on the governing council of the Kim-Alla School in Northern Nigeria.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Wetherall.

  “And I was adviser on schools to the Government of Hyderabad.”

  “Mr. Fawcus has strong ideas on the modernisation of education, haven’t you, Fawcus?”

  Mr. Fawcus raised himself a couple of times onto his toes – a purely symbolic gesture, demonstrating the strength of his ideas – and said: “Speaking for myself I should like to see all curricula founded on a flexible basis of stenography, shorthand, double entry book-keeping, and elementary commercial law – only elementary, of course. Can’t turn boys into jurists. No, no. Just a basis of accountancy and a basis of law. What do you think, Colonel?”

  “Well, really,” said the colonel. “What do you think, Wetherall?”

  “I may be old-fashioned,” said Mr. Wetherall, “but I must confess that I hold the opinion that education is a general training of the mind for all vocations. I’m sure you agree, Colonel?”

  “I’m just a plain man of action,” said the colonel. “Not one of your long-haired theorists. What do you say, Fawcus?”

  “In a limited sense—”

  “After all,” said Mr. Wetherall, “once you start on that line, where are you going to stop? If you try to foresee what job each boy’s going to do in life, and then get his poor little nose straight down to that particular grindstone, you’re back in the days of child labour and the Factory Acts.”

  “I think you exaggerate,” said Mr. Fawcus. “In my experience—”

  “—silly old fool,” said Mr. Wetherall to his wife, when he managed to telephone her. “Lock him in for an hour with one of my junior forms and he might begin to understand what education’s about. After all that I shall be too late to get back for lunch. Has Peter Crowdy arrived?”

  “Yes. He’s here.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I think so. He’s very quiet.”

  “I’ll get home as early as I can this evening.”

  III

  When Mr. Wetherall got home he found his wife and Peter Crowdy sitting in front of the fire.

  He thought at first that the scarlet patch in each of the boy’s cheeks might have been caused by the heat of the room, but then he realised that he was wrong. Although outwardly his pale-faced, reserved, polite, awkward self, there was now something at work inside. It was something bitter and shocking and only partly understood.

  The first thing the boy expected was to have to answer questions. His defensive position told Mr. Wetherall that. Accordingly he asked him none at all. He talked for a time, in his easy way, to both of them, and soon after supper he sent Peter to bed.

  “What’s wrong with that boy?” said Mrs. Wetherall.

  “Shock, wouldn’t you think. Losing his father—”

  “Yes, I know. But it’s something more than that—I thought—I don’t know.”

  Mr. Wetherall badly wanted to talk to someone about things. It would have been nice to talk to his wife, but the ice of years is not easily broken.

  He supposed that there might be marriages, not just work-a- day, good-enough, bread-and-butter marriages like his own, but the true and lovely thing itself where no barriers existed and no reticence was possible.

  His mouth was open to speak when the telephone rang in the hall.

  It was Sergeant Donovan.

  He said: “Have you got that boy there, Mr. Wetherall?”

  “Yes. I’ve just sent him to bed.”

  “Best place for him. I rang up to warn you not to be surprised if you saw a couple of characters hanging about in the street. One of them might even be me.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Nothing in particular. We don’t want to lose this one, do we?”

  “No,” said Mr. Wetherall. “Of course not. But has anything in particular—”

  He was speaking to a dead telephone. Sergeant Donovan had gone.

  He made his way slowly back to the sitting-room.

  “Who was it?”

  “Patsy Donovan.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Wetherall went on with her knitting without comment. Not long afterwards she rolled it all up into an untidy bag and went off to bed. Before he followed her, Mr. Wetherall went into the kitchen, got up on a chair, felt inside the cupboard in the corner, and turned off the gas at the main. He did this quietly and almost guiltily, but he did it nevertheless. Whatever Sergeant Donovan might say, in his opinion Peter Crowdy’s worst enemies were inside his own head.

  Later, in bed, Mrs. Wetherall said: “That telephone’s a very loud speaker. You can hear every word from the drawing-room. Don’t tell me if you’d rather not, but—”

  Fortified by the friendly darkness he lay back and told her everything.

  At the end of it, and for perhaps the first time in their married life, she managed to surprise him.

  “You always resented missing the war, didn’t you,” she said. “Yes,” said Mr. Wetheral
l “I did. Why?”

  “It looks as if you’ve got one on your hands now.” Then they both went to sleep.

  5

  SOHO – THE ALDERSHOT LADIES

  Mr. Wetherall woke, for no reason at all, at five o’clock and tiptoed into the room next door. Peter Crowdy was sleeping peacefully. He then went out into the passage and looked out of the end window. It was difficult to be certain, but he fancied that somewhere among the shadows between the street lamps a man was standing. He got back into bed and, feeling that he was not going to get any more sleep, he composed his mind to his problems.

  It occurred to him that he could do with a bit of help. It was all very fine and large for Alice to talk about war, but wars were fought by armies; and armies had Transport and Supplies and Signals and Provost and Intelligence Services. The latter in particular. What he most needed at the moment was an Intelligence Department.

  Even as he considered it a name came into his head. Todd. Alastair Todd. “Sweeney” Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. So pleased was he with this inspiration that he at once fell asleep, with the smile still on his lips, and he awoke to find his wife shaking him and telling him that she had called him twice, that his toast was burnt to a cinder and don’t blame her, and did he want to be late at the school?

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Not going in this morning. Too much to do.”

  After breakfast he made three telephone calls. The first was to Peggy, telling her that he hoped to be in some time during the afternoon. If anyone important wanted him she must say that he had a touch of pulmonary gastritis.

  “It was pulmonary gasworks last time,” said Peggy.

  “All right, I’m going to a funeral. Near relative.”

  He rang off, dialled “Trunks” and spoke for some time to a man called Ap-Lloyd, whom he seemed to know very well.

  After that his address book came into play again and he dialled a number at Wimbledon.