Milly had heard of this Janette before. She was the shadowy, amorphous girl-friend who always seemed to have come yesterday, or to be coming tomorrow, but was never here today. When Jacko or Kevin mentioned her, which was not often, they spoke of her with a sort of off-hand resignation as if she was a neighbour’s cat for which they felt a vague responsibility: and now here was Kevin triumphantly locked in the bedroom with her, and Jacko, white and near to tears, locked outside it.
“There hasn’t been a sound since teatime,” he gulped. “They must be…. They’re….”
Kid’s stuff, Milly remembered: and now here was the jaded veteran of a thousand sexual encounters not even daring to pronounce the correct words.
She consoled him as best she could. Yes, she had to agree, they probably were, but so what? This Janette, she wasn’t specially Jacko’s girl-friend, was she? No, no, of course she wasn’t! Nor Kevin’s either! That was the whole point, didn’t Milly see? It wasn’t serious, they’d agreed it wasn’t serious, and now … and now …!
It wasn’t that it was boring: far from it: but Milly was getting hungrier and hungrier, and flattered though she was by being chosen as Jacko’s confidante, she found herself watching, with increasing fervour, for some gap in the jeremiad into which it wouldn’t be too heartless to insert a suggestion about opening the tin of soup. In the end she got her way by roundabout means: by first getting Jacko to put some sad music on the record-player, then something a bit less sad, and by the time a loud pop song was drumming through the room, and Mrs Mumford had yelled up to them to turn that noise down, the mention of food no longer seemed blasphemous. It was just then, as it happened, that Kevin and Janette reappeared, very cheerful and friendly, with a bottle of cider and a packet of frozen kippers. With these substantial supplements to Milly’s tin of soup, there was plenty for everyone, and even Jacko began to cheer up. Soon, Mrs Mumford was yelling up the stairs a second time. She expected some consideration, she shrieked, and did they know what the time was? The third time, she didn’t yell, but stamped up with a tray of tea and freshly-baked mince-pies, and demanded that a waltz be put on the record-player. If they were determined to shake the house to pieces with their great elephant feet, she scolded, they might at least do it dancing something that was a dance. What, they didn’t know how to waltz?—she’d show them, if it was the last thing she did! And though it wasn’t the last thing she did, not by a very long way, she did show them; and they showed her how to gyrate to their rhythms, and by the end of the evening Milly was finding it incredible that anyone could ever want to make Enquiries about anything. Life is so simple, if only you don’t make Enquiries about it, and if the Town Hall man had turned up then and there, Milly would have told him.
He didn’t, though: nor was there a summons for her in the post next morning, nor a policeman waiting outside Mrs Graham’s flat to arrest her as she went in. And though Mrs Graham’s phone went several times during the morning, it was never for Milly. Through the wall, she could hear Mrs Graham’s voice, bored and irritable, exactly as if it was her husband each time, but of course it couldn’t have been.
Only when she arrived at Mrs Day’s that afternoon did something happen which forced Milly to think again about her unknown visitor of last night. As usual, there was a note waiting for her, in Mrs Day’s wild writing, but this time it wasn’t about the strrt grr, nor about rinsing the hwrf grool in three lots of cold water: it was a telephone message. A Mr Loops, it seemed, had phouled asking for Mrs Baines, he wanted to get in touch with her ooplardy, and would phoul again this umpternoon.
He wouldn’t, though. Milly made sure of that by taking the receiver off. Then she set about her work with unusual speed and concentration. No reading today; no lounging about on sofas, or speculating on why there should be a scarlet dog-harness on top of the deep-freeze, and no dog. Mrs Day’s new flower-patterned tights, slit neatly open all down one leg, left her incurious. She just wanted to get finished, to get out of the place. Even though the telephone was effectively silenced, she still felt uncomfortable every time she caught sight of it. She pictured Mr Loops (or was it Soap, or Reeves?) fiddling about right now, at the other end of the wire, dialling and re-dialling, calling the operator … It seemed to bring him horribly near.
She finished her work much earlier than usual, while it was still just light, and as she hurried home through the damp, gusty twilight, her nerves were all on edge, as if she knew, already, the news that she was going to hear.
Yes, the man had been here again; and this time he had not been so easily put off. He had attempted to start an argument about Milly’s non-existence, and Jacko had only managed to get rid of him by pretending that he, Jacko, was in a fearful hurry, already late for a lecture. At this, the man had given up—but not before looking at Jacko in a very funny way, and saying he would be calling back later on.
“Well—thanks, Jacko,” said Milly dazedly. She was still in her outdoor things, she had not yet closed the front door, and now there was no need. Turning around, she walked out into the night.
*
At first, she could not decide where she was walking, or why; but gradually, as her dazed wits cleared, she realised that she was after all doing quite a sensible thing. She only had to stay out until Mrs Mumford’s locking-up time, and her persecutor would be foiled, at least for tonight. After the magic hour of eleven, Mrs Mumford would admit nobody, on any pretext, and Milly would be able to sleep in peace. Briefly, she thanked heaven for the pockets of narrow-mindedness that still linger on, especially in small towns like this. With a permissive London landlady, she would have been doomed.
Doomed? What a drama she was making of it all! Why was she allowing a second visit from this same man so to throw her?—it was no more, and no less, sinister than the first one. He was no more likely to be a policeman or a detective today than he was yesterday—less, if anything, because surely police working on a murder case move faster than this? Having alerted their victim by a first visit, surely they wouldn’t just leave her to her own devices for another twenty-four hours? Not that it wasn’t prudent to make herself scarce for the evening, all the same. “Like he might be from the Town Hall,” Jacko had said: and if she was going to have to make up a whole new batch of lies about her insurance stamps, or her tax-assessment, or something, then she didn’t want it to happen at home, with Mrs Mumford hovering attentively in the background, checking the new lies against the old.
Milly felt that she had walked a very long way, but it couldn’t actually have been more than a mile or two, because she was only now coming into the straight, wide road that led to the station. It couldn’t be very late, either—not more than half past six or seven—because the brightly-lit little booking-hall was alive with commuters just off the London train. They were pouring out from the lighted entrance, pulling up their collars, re-tying their scarves as the wind caught them: and Milly was suddenly and disconcertingly reminded of her own arrival here, nearly four weeks ago. For a moment, as she watched the hurrying, anonymous people fanning out into the dark, she had the strangest feeling of going backwards in time. Just as she had arrived here on a night of damp, gusty cold, the station lights flickering weakly in the wind, so, now, she seemed to be returning, on just such a night, by the way she had come … back into the train … back to Victoria Station, joining once again the creeping queues, head down, scarf once again pulled across her mouth to avoid recognition … back, back, into the Underground, circling round and round, backwards, backwards, spiralling back and back until she was thrust out into the icy streets of the January dawn, her heels once again clattering in the emptiness as she ran. Ran, and ran, but the other way, this time, towards and not away from that basement in Lady Street, where Gilbert was still waiting, watch in hand, checking on how long she had been away.
Milly rubbed her eyes. She shook herself, and stamped her cold feet. It was all right: that old crone silhouetted against the lighted tobacconists was not Mrs Roach, she couldn’t be,
this was Seacliffe, not Lady Street. As she blinked, and stared around, trying to get her bearings once again, she had a swift impression of a crest of white hair, glimpsed above the heads of the hurrying crowd; but in a moment it was gone, and the nightmare was gone too. She was here! She was now! The awful power of the past was receding, slipping back into the dark as suddenly as it had come, and she could scarcely even feel, now, the places where its icy fingers had momentarily touched her soul.
Idly, to fill in some of the time till eleven o’clock, she wandered into the station cafeteria, buying a newspaper as she went. As before, she found herself a table by the radiator; but this time, she had a cup of coffee and a roll and butter of her own, properly paid for. Her own newspaper to read, too. No need, this time, to peer and twist this way and that to catch a glimpse of other people’s. Her feelings, too, were changed, and although she scanned carefully every column, every paragraph, for something about the Lady Street Murder, there was a curious lack of urgency about it. It was as if she knew, already, that this was not the direction from which the blow would come.
CHAPTER XX
“AH, THERE YOU are, Mrs Er! I wonder if you can help me? People keep ringing up and asking for a Mrs Barnes! All yesterday, and now they’ve started again today. I can’t get on with anything! You don’t know anything about a Mrs Barnes, do you, Mrs Er? It’s not someone you know?”
Mrs Graham was sitting with her hand resting irritably on the telephone, looking harassed and aggrieved. She always reacted to having her time unexpectedly taken up as another woman might to having her handbag stolen, and she was looking at Milly, who had just arrived, with a mixture of appeal and accusation.
“No,” said Milly. It was not so much a lie as an automatic reaction, like blinking the eyes in response to sudden movement. The turmoil of shock and alarm which had flooded over her at Mrs Graham’s words had rendered her quite incapable, for the moment, of deciding whether to lie or not to lie. The weighing-up of the question whether it was more dangerous to deny her identity than to admit it, was simply beyond her. So, “No,” she said, and watched the room spin round her, with Mrs Graham’s face revolving in the foreground, like a white ping-pong ball on the end of a string. Gradually, the whirling furniture slowed down, came to a standstill. Mrs Graham’s face came to rest too, came into focus, and Milly began to hear the words formed by her moving lips.
“It couldn’t be more inconvenient!” she was grumbling. “I’m just starting to summarise the Class C2 responses, and I seem to be twenty interviews short! Twenty! It will invalidate the whole survey! And all that fool of a Miss Bracken can say is that she thinks they were all sent in! Thinks!—I ask you! And then she has the cheek to suggest that I should simply extrapolate from the interviews I have got! Extrapolate! Me! I may not be the most punctilious researcher in the world, Mrs Er, but that’s one thing I’ll never do. I’ll never extrapolate!”
One felt there should have been a roar of applause at this heroic declaration: but all Milly could find to say was “No”. “No, I should think not, indeed!” she amended hastily, as Mrs Graham’s raised eyebrows warned her that her response had been altogether too tepid. To find herself accused of condoning the evils of extrapolation as well as of murdering her husband was too much, and for a moment she just stood there, while her problems swayed like shadowy swing-boats in front of her, huge and ungraspable, and steadily gathering momentum.
They were closing in on her. They were moving in for the kill. No use, any longer, pretending that someone wanted to offer her a job, sell her an encyclopaedia, or ask her opinion about a new washing-up liquid. Indeed, it wasn’t just “someone” any longer, it was a whole host of them, assembling to hunt her down. “People keep ringing up,” Mrs Graham had said: even allowing for exaggeration, the words could hardly refer to fewer than three. They knew where she worked now, as well as where she lived. And that Mr Loops yesterday … he was in the plot with the rest of them, of course he was: which meant they had tracked her down to Mrs Day’s as well …
“In the plot”—“tracked her down”—“They”—“Them”—Where had she heard these words before? In the urgency of her panic, Milly did not pursue the thought. The important thing, now, was to plan her getaway—either a simple physical one in the form of packing up and getting on a train, or a more subtle one based on lies, and more lies, told with expertise and panache.
Who better qualified than her for such a task? Toughened as she was by a prolonged survival-course in deception, she would be able to out-lie the lot of them; against her impassioned falsehoods they would break themselves as against a rock, and she would be free….
But how much did they already know? The first principle of successful lying is to assemble in front of you all the data already irrevocably in the hands of your opponent, and see how it can be rearranged to your advantage. You can’t subtract anything, of course, but you can add bits: and if you are clever you can twist a bit here, alter a sequence there, until the whole tenor of the thing seems to be changed, and they are left staring in blank dismay at the case they thought they had against you, and wondering what has hit them.
But first, you have to find out exactly what their case is: what data they have so far succeeded in assembling against you….
“Data isn’t the problem!” Mrs Graham was proclaiming (how had she got on to this from the extrapolations?). “Any fool can collect the data. It’s the interpretation that counts, especially with the D-E’s. As I keep trying to make Miss Bracken understand, the ‘Don’t know’s’ aren’t just …”
“No, indeed!” said Milly heartily—and Mrs Graham stared at her, startled, but vaguely pleased by support from this unexpected quarter. “I do so agree with you, it’s what I’ve always thought myself,” continued Milly recklessly. “But this woman who rang up, this Mrs Barnes, did she say what she wanted?”
Milly had deliberately muddled the issue, got it all wrong, so that Mrs Graham should overlook her odd persistence in the pleasure of putting her right. There are moments when an ounce of confusion is worth pounds of apology and explanation.
“Who?” Mrs Graham looked vague for a moment. “Oh, you mean all those wrong numbers! No, Mrs Er, it wasn’t the Barnes woman who was ringing, it was …” here she paused, studying Milly’s IQ as one might study the physique of the man who has come to move the grand piano.
“Oh, well,” she concluded, with a sigh that conveyed more clearly than words the boredom she felt at the prospect of trying to make such as Milly understand. “Never mind. It’s not important. Though I do wish people would listen to reason, I really do. That man this morning, he just wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, he kept saying he knew she was here. Apparently the woman has run away, or something, and he all but accused me of harbouring her! Me! As if I’ve got nothing better to do!”—here she rattled a fresh page into the typewriter, signifying unassailable busy-ness.
“And now, Mrs Er, if you wouldn’t mind …? I’m an hour behind already, it’s been just one thing after another the whole morning….”
Milly gave up, and retired, chastened, to get on with her work. Through the ceaseless clackety-clack of the typewriter behind the closed door, she kept listening for the telephone, but it only rang once. From the bored, slightly aggrieved tones of Mrs Graham’s voice, it might have been absolutely anything: Professor Graham saying that he was going to be late (or early) for lunch: someone wanting to borrow a book: or perhaps a friend or relative in sudden, desperate trouble, and expecting Mrs Graham to interrupt her typing to listen to it. Mrs Graham’s vast and unselective capacity for boredom could have embraced the lot. Milly listened through the door until her ears sang and her very jawbones were tense, but she could pick up no clues. And after a while, soothed by the droning of the Hoover and by all her familiar tasks, Milly gradually gave up thinking about the problem. Anyway, there was nothing she could usefully do. As with any cat-and-mouse game, the mouse stands to gain most by remaining in his usual hole, alert an
d inconspicuous, relying on his smallness, and on his intimate knowledge of the terrain. It is the cat who must stick his neck out, make the rules, and generally get things going.
CHAPTER XXI
MILLY STOOD FOR a number of minutes after she had arrived at Mrs Day’s, staring down at the telephone and wondering if she would feel safer if she took the receiver off or if she didn’t. The pale winter sun, higher and higher every day now, was flooding in through the wide window, showing up every finger-mark, every dingy streak, on the elegant white instrument. Milly noticed, wonderingly, that her fingers were fidgeting to get at it with a damp cloth, just as if nothing had happened. They seemed as if they were separate animals altogether, quite unconnected with herself, and with her seething brain, lashing itself into a fever of indecision as to whether to leave the thing alone to do its worst, or to silence it, as could so easily be done. It was like deciding whether to give tranquillisers to a savage guard-dog. To do so, you have to go uncomfortably close, and yet not to do so may result in being torn to pieces later on. There is no way of guessing in advance which will work best: no evidence one way or the other. No one knows, least of all the guard-dog.
Milly picked up the receiver and laid it gently on the polished table, and at once it began muttering at her in feeble protest. Straightaway, like an over-anxious mother with her crying baby, she snatched it up and restored it to its proper place: then wished she had left it off after all. The whimpering would have stopped in the end. Off with it, then—the spoilt thing! —let it whine itself to sleep, with her safely out of hearing! She would shut the door on it, she would run to the other end of the flat and switch the Hoover on till it was all over! Then, at last, her nerves would begin to relax, and she would be able to get on with her work safe in the knowledge that the telephone not only wouldn’t ring, it couldn’t!
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