by Andrew Garve
I said, “We wouldn’t have to have children.’’
“What’s marriage without children? If we didn’t, and it was because of me, you’d probably finish up by hating me.… Peter, you’re wrong, I’m sure you are. What we feel about each other now is beside the point. I love you, and I know you love me because you’ve shown it, and I know we’d both make a great effort—but it wouldn’t work. If we married, it would be a broken-backed affair from the beginning.… I simply don’t believe there’s any possibility of happiness for us together.’’
I got up. “Well,’’ I said, “I don’t agree, but if you feel like that there’s obviously no point in discussing it any more at the moment. Perhaps you’ll see things differently as time goes on.’’
“It would be better if you didn’t think so, Peter—I can’t see how the situation can alter. I shan’t marry at all—and you’ll be far better off with someone else. Write me off, Peter—don’t just stick around hoping things will change. It’s not fair to yourself.’’
“That’s for me to decide,’’ I said.
Chapter Eleven
I saw nothing at all of Mary during the next week. For the first few days I was out of town on a story, and by the time I got back she’d started putting out feelers about a new secretarial job and was busy seeing people in the mornings, which was usually the only time I was free. I kept in touch with her by phone and she was quite friendly and told me what she was doing and how she was getting on, but when I tried to make a date with her for the weekend she stalled and I couldn’t pin her down.
Frustration over Mary was quite enough to keep me milling over the Galloway case. The way things were, it seemed pretty clear that my affair with her was just about through. She’d made up her mind, and I didn’t think I’d be able to change it, unless there was a change in the Galloway situation. I kept telling myself that the case was all over now, that there wasn’t a loophole left, that dwelling on it was just a waste of energy—but I couldn’t let it alone. It worried me that Mary hadn’t been able to accept the evidence. Blind faith against the weight of facts was pretty stupid—and Mary was anything but stupid. It wasn’t as though she’d had even the glimmer of a doubt. I found it most disturbing. She’d even succeeded in communicating a little of her feeling to me—enough, at least, to make me wish I’d known Galloway myself so that I could have formed my own impression. But it was too late for that now—talking to him through a grille wouldn’t be any help.
For several days I continued to go over the rat run of the evidence. I looked at the case again from every angle. My earlier inquiries had been based on the assumption that if Galloway hadn’t stolen Shaw’s plot he probably hadn’t murdered him either. Now I tried another approach. Even though Galloway had stolen Shaw’s plot, that didn’t necessarily mean he’d murdered him. The evidence for the first was conclusive; the evidence for the second might still, conceivably, be got round. The crucial question, of course, was one which sooner or later Mary and I would have to face in any event—if Galloway hadn’t killed Shaw, who had? The answer to that was a blank. As the prosecution had said, there were no other suspects on the horizon. That might be because no one had made any serious attempt to look for any. The defense lawyers would scarcely have known where to start. The police had been convinced from the beginning that they’d got the guilty man so they wouldn’t have bothered. Or, more likely, it was because there just weren’t any. Certainly nothing had emerged from my own inquiries to suggest that anyone else might have wanted to kill Shaw. Apart from his attitude to Galloway he’d appeared to be the most inoffensive of men. So why should anyone else have attacked him on the towpath?
There was only one way to get an answer to that—assuming there was an answer—and that was to make a new and more exhaustive check on Shaw’s relationships with other people. As soon as I got back to town I drew up a list of the more obvious things to look into. There was the possibility that Shaw had been involved with some woman and through her had come up against some man. There was the possibility that he’d been on bad terms with his sister’s errant husband. And there was the possibility that the two people who’d overheard the quarrel on the boat had not been just casual passers-by. I didn’t think any of the ideas held out much promise, but in a last-ditch struggle long odds were inevitable. At least I wouldn’t be giving Mary up without a fight.
Next morning, therefore, I called again on Mrs. Green. I thanked her for the parcel she’d sent me and pressed a small additional check on her. Then I began to probe as tactfully as I could into the more personal aspects of her late brother’s life, pretending I wanted the information so that I could give a more rounded picture of him in the book I was planning. But my duplicity got me nowhere. Of course, said Mrs. Green, Robert could have had a girl friend and kept quiet about her, but he’d never seemed very much interested in the opposite sex and he’d certainly never dropped a hint about anyone to her. As for making enemies, I gathered that he’d never had a stand-up quarrel with anyone in his life until he’d met John Galloway. Mrs. Green made him sound almost as colorless as she was herself. I asked her how he’d got on with her husband, and she said the two of them hadn’t had much in common because her husband had been rather wild and Robert had been quiet and conventional. Robert had taken a poor view of her husband going off the way he had and leaving his family, but she didn’t think there’d been any words between them. I said I’d rather like to talk to her husband, in case he had another angle on Robert, and would she mind telling me where I could find him, and she gave me his address. Apparently he lived and worked at Slough, where he was some sort of engineer.
I couldn’t get to Slough that day but in the evening I was sent to cover a political meeting at Twickenham and that gave me a chance to take a look at Donald Thorpe, the towpath witness. At his house, which I reached just before ten, I was told he was at the pictures with his fiancée and would be taking her home afterward, so I drove to her address in Surbiton and waited outside in the car until they showed up. The light wasn’t good in the road and I couldn’t see them very clearly but what I could see was prepossessing. Thorpe was a dark-haired, good-looking young man of husky build and the girl an exceptionally pretty blonde. She turned out to be the Anita Robinson who’d been with him the night Shaw had been killed. I apologized for troubling them at such a late hour and told my story about writing up the Shaw case. They were both quite friendly and ready enough to talk, but now that I’d seen them I’d rather lost interest. They seemed a straightforward pair and I couldn’t believe there’d been anything sinister about their towpath walk. I took them quickly through the quarrel incident again and then drove back to town.
I was on day duty next day, which meant that by seven in the evening I was free to go in search of Mrs. Green’s husband at Slough. I found him eventually in a pub near his lodgings, drinking beer with a couple of cronies. He was a formidable-looking chap, with heavy shoulders and a swarthy, scowling face. At least, it scowled at me when I told him what I wanted. He’d had enough beer to make him difficult and he couldn’t see why I should want to know so much about Shaw even if I was writing up the case. I paid for a round of drinks and managed to smooth him down and finally got a franker view about Shaw than I’d expected. According to Green, he’d been a “prissy little runt’’ and not a man at all. Clever, Green said, in a sly way, but bloodless, like his sister. Not that Green had known him well, but he hadn’t wanted to—it had been the mistake of his life ever to get mixed up with that family. He spoke with contempt for Shaw, rather than dislike, and I couldn’t imagine he’d ever have troubled to quarrel with him. When I mentioned the possibility of a woman in Shaw’s life, Green gave a guffaw that shook the pub. I left shortly before closing time, having got precisely nowhere.
By now I’d exhausted my list of people to question. If I tried, I could probably dig up some more contacts, but I felt far from encouraged. The only result of my inquiries had been to make it seem even more unlikely that any o
f Shaw’s acquaintances would have felt strongly enough about him to kill him. There was, perhaps, an outside chance that he might have been attacked by a complete stranger, some towpath thug, but it seemed highly improbable, particularly as there’d been no suggestion of robbery—and in any case there was nothing I could do about that. I drove home in a very dejected frame of mind.
It was after eleven when I reached the flat. I’d have liked to ring Mary, if only to hear the sound of her voice, but I remembered that she’d have to go downstairs to answer the phone and it seemed a bit late to disturb the houee for a chat. Instead, I had a bath and turned in with a book. But I couldn’t read. I lay in bed with the light on, thinking about Mary, thinking about Galloway and the mess he’d made of her life and his own, thinking how unnecessary it had all been, thinking what an extraordinary aberration it had been for him to risk stealing someone else’s plot when he was such a competent storyteller himself.… It took a bit of understanding. In fact, if there hadn’t been so much evidence it would have been quite unbelievable. My thoughts switched to the defense plea at the trial—the plea of coincidence. They could never have thought they had much hope of getting away with it, yet I could see why they’d chosen it—they’d had nothing else. And, of course, chance was an odd thing. It was said that if enough monkeys hammered on enough typewriters for long enough, they’d produce all Shakespeare’s plays. One didn’t have to go as far into fantasy as that to suppose that Galloway and Shaw, working separately, might have hammered out the same plot. But still too far for credibility. The nearest the defense had come to making their plea credible was when they’d suggested that both men might, unwittingly, have drawn the plot from the same source. Suppose they had both come across the original, years ago, in the same book and forgotten all about it? Shaw, at least, must have read pretty well everything in the thriller line that had ever been published.…
I glanced across at the great pile of thrillers still stacked against the wall. It was absurd, I thought—it would be a complete waste of time to look through them. But time was something I didn’t value very much at the moment and I certainly had a unique opportunity to discover just what Shaw had read.… I got out of bed and pulled up a chair and started to go systematically through the pile. Shaw had evidently been an assiduous buyer at secondhand shops, for quite a lot of the hard-cover books were old titles that had been published in the twenties and thirties, and many of the paperbacks were pretty ancient too. I took them as they came. Some I could set aside at once because I’d read them, and remembered what they were about. Most of the paperbacks had a short summary of the plot on the cover. Where there wasn’t a summary, it needed little more than a glance inside to tell me what the plot was about. In the course of half an hour or so I found two with sea themes and one with a diving background, but naturally they had no relation to the Shaw-Galloway plot.
I was about three-quarters of the way through the pile when I noticed the corner of a photograph protruding from one of the books, and pulled it out. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a well-set-up young man in his middle twenties, good-looking in a rather tough way, with darkish hair and a dark hairline mustache. Oddly enough, I had a feeling that I’d seen him somewhere, but I couldn’t place him. I wondered if he was well-known, because it was a glossy picture, the sort generally used for press reproduction. I turned it over and there was a name on the back—Grant Fresher. It didn’t mean anything to me. The name was written in ink but it didn’t look like a signature—it looked more like a record made by a filing clerk. In fact, the whole picture reminded me of photographs I’d seen in the Art Library at the Post. I had another look at the face and it certainly seemed familiar. What was more, I had a notion I’d seen it very recently, while I’d been making my inquiries about Shaw. It was some young man I’d met in the last day or two.… At once, I thought of Donald Thorpe. It could be he. I hadn’t seen his face very clearly, I didn’t even know whether he’d had a hairline mustache or not, but the type of face was certainly the same.
It was an exciting idea. Perhaps, after all, I’d been hasty in dismissing Thorpe from the case after ten minutes’ conversation in the dark. If he and Shaw had been acquainted before the murder, the possibilities were limitless. They could have been deeply involved with each other in a dozen different ways. Thorpe’s girl friend could have been involved too. The impression of youthful innocence that she and Thorpe had given me might have been completely phony. That towpath stroll of theirs might, after all, have been sinister. But there wasn’t much point in speculating until I’d taken another look at Thorpe and checked whether he really was the man in the picture. I decided I’d drive down first thing in the morning and try and catch him before he left for work.
With so much on my mind I slept fitfully, and I was glad when daylight came. I rose at six, brewed myself some coffee, and left just after seven for Teddington. By a quarter to eight I was parked outside Thorpe’s house, waiting for him to come out. I didn’t think I’d need to speak to him—one look would be enough to tell me whether he was the man I hoped he was, and after that I could make my plans at leisure. I didn’t have to wait long. At five past eight the front door opened and he came out smartly. He paused to open the gate, giving me a good view of his face—and I saw with a pang of disappointment that he wasn’t the man in the picture. The style was the same, but the features were quite different. Despondently, I started the engine and set off back to town.
The first thing I did when I reached the flat was to take another look at the picture. I thought perhaps I’d been imagining things, but I hadn’t. It did remind me of someone, most strongly. Perhaps, I thought, it was of someone I’d seen in the course of my Shaw inquiries, but not in connection with them. I wished I could place the man, because if I couldn’t it was bound to nag at me. I cooked some breakfast and read through the Post and then I went and had another look at the picture. It was, I decided, the expression of the eyes that was familiar, but I still didn’t know who it was.
I had a free day ahead and no special plans for filling it. After breakfast I went into the bedroom to clear up the books which were still scattered about the floor. There weren’t many now that I hadn’t looked at and I thought I might as well finish the job I’d started. I squatted down among the litter and began to work my way through the last pile. I’d almost got to the end when, as I turned the flyleaf of a rather tattered volume, my eye was caught by the name of the author—Grant Fresher. So Fresher was a writer—one I hadn’t heard of—and this, presumably, was the book I’d pulled the photograph out of, since the two things clearly went together. The title of the book was The Black Hat. It was a stiff-covered, secondhand book, which Shaw had apparently bought for ninepence. I paged through it, but its theme wasn’t anything to do with underwater diving. It was a tough gangster story, a bit sexy. I looked to see when it had been published, and the year was 1934.
Suddenly, it occurred to me that if the book was twenty years old, the photograph might be twenty years old, too—in which case Fresher might well look very different now. It seemed quite likely, because men didn’t wear hairline mustaches much nowadays. I went to the photograph again and covered up the mustache and curved my hand experimentally round the top of Fresher’s head to hide the youthful hair—and at once I knew whom it reminded me of.
Richard Dancy!
I was enormously intrigued—but cautious. I’d made one mistake about the picture already that day. It didn’t have to be Dancy, I told myself, just because it reminded me of him. Lots of people looked a bit like each other.… I delved among the heap of paperback thrillers and found one by Dancy, with a picture of him on the back cover. It didn’t help much. The look in the eyes was the same, but that was all. Dancy’s face was much plumper, his mouth tighter. I could easily be deceiving myself. But if I wasn’t, it was a fascinating find. Dancy had said that Shaw had been a stranger to him. That could still be true, of course. Shaw could have bought this book secondhand with the photograph al
ready in it—a photograph left by some earlier fan of Fresher’s, perhaps—without having any idea that it was of Dancy. But if the picture had belonged to a fan, why wasn’t it properly autographed? If it hadn’t, where had it come from? Wasn’t it, in any case, rather a coincidence that Shaw should have had in his possession an old, unrecognized photograph of Dancy by another name, and that Dancy should have been one of the three authors he’d picked on to send his manuscript to?
I thought about it for a while. I couldn’t see anything very clearly. I certainly didn’t jump to any lightning conclusions. All I knew was that there were a lot of questions in my mind and that I’d like to find out more about Grant Fresher. I looked to see who had published The Black Hat and it was a well-known firm named Gale & McGhee, who had their office in St. James’s. Twenty minutes later I was on my way to see them.
Chapter Twelve
I had no appointment, and it took me a little time to find anyone at Gale & McGhee’s who could tell me anything at all. I saw a secretary, who passed me on to a young man, who looked at my copy of The Black Hat and said he was sorry, he’d never even heard of Fresher himself, but perhaps Mr. Cogan, the senior partner, would be able to help me, only he was busy at the moment and would I care to hang on? I said I would and he disappeared with the book and I waited. It was nearly eleven when I was finally shown into Cogan’s office. The senior partner was a distinguished-looking man, white-haired and sixtyish, with an Edwardian charm of manner.
He shook hands and motioned me to a chair. He had my copy of The Black Hat on the desk in front of him. “Well, now, Mr. Rennie,’’ he said, “I understand you’ve been making inquiries about Grant Fresher?’’