by H. E. Bates
No one in Claypole knew much about Miss Porteus. We knew she had been an actress, but where she had been an actress, and in what plays and in what theatres, and when, nobody knew. She looked like an actress: she was tall and very haughty and her hair, once blonde, was something of the colour of tobacco-stained moustaches, a queer yellowish ginger, as though the dye had gone wrong. Her lips were red and bitter; and with her haughty face she looked like a cold nasty woman in a play. She dressed, just for show, exactly the opposite of every other woman in Claypole: in winter she came out in chiffon and in summer you would see her walking across the golf-course, not speaking to anyone, in great fox furs something the colour of her own hair.
Her shop was just the same: at a time when every milliner-draper in Claypole used to cram as much into the shop-window as possible, Miss Porteus introduced that style of one hat on a stand and a vase of expensive flowers on a length of velvet. But somehow that never quite came off. The solitary hat looked rather like Miss Porteus herself: lonely and haughty and out of place.
The backways of her shop and ours faced on to each other; the gardens were divided by a partition of boards and fencing, but we could see from our bathroom into Miss Porteus’s bathroom. You could see a great array of fancy cosmetic bottles outlined behind the frosted glass. You could see Miss Porteus at her toilet. But you never saw anyone else there.
Then one day we did see someone else there. One Wednesday morning my wife came scuffling into the shop and behind the counter, where I was mending a tuppenny-ha’penny Swiss lever that I’d had lying about for months, and said that she’d seen a man in Miss Porteus’s back-yard.
‘Well, what about it?’ I said. ‘I don’t care if there’s fifty men. Perhaps that’s what she wants, a man or two,’ I said. Just like that.
I was busy and I thought no more about it. But as it turned out afterwards, my wife did. I daresay she was a bit inquisitive, but while she was arranging the bedroom curtains she saw the man several times. She got a clear view of him: he was middle-aged and he had side-linings and he wore a yellow tie.
That night, when I went to bed, the light was burning in Miss Porteus’s bathroom, but I couldn’t see Miss Porteus. Then when I went into the bathroom next morning the light was still burning. I said, ‘Hullo, Miss Porteus left the light on all night,’ but I thought no more about it. Then when I went up at midday, the light was still on. It was still on that afternoon and it was on all that night.
My wife was scared. But I said, ‘Oh! it’s Thursday and she’s taken a day off and gone up to London.’ But the light went on burning all the next day and it was still burning late that night.
By that time I was puzzled myself. I went and tried Miss Porteus’s shop door. It was locked. But there was really nothing strange about that. It was eleven o’clock at night and it ought to have been locked.
We went to bed, but my wife couldn’t sleep. She kept saying I ought to do something. ‘What can I do?’ I said. At last she jumped up in bed. ‘You’ve got to get a ladder out and climb up and see if everything’s all right in Miss Porteus’s bathroom,’ she said.
‘Oh! all right,’ I said.
So I heaved our ladder over the boards and then ran it up to Miss Porteus’s bathroom window. I climbed up. That was the picture they took of me later on: up the ladder, pointing to the bathroom window, which was marked with a cross. All the papers had it in.
What I saw through the bathroom window, even through the frosted glass, was bad enough, but it was only when I had telephoned to the police station and we had forced an entrance that I saw how really terrible it was.
Miss Porteus was lying on the bathroom floor with a bullet wound in her chest. We banged the door against her head as we went in. She had been dead for some time and I could almost calculate how long, because of the light. She was in a cerise pink nightgown and the blood had made a little rosette on her chest.
‘Bolt the garden gate and say nothing to nobody,’ the sergeant said.
I said nothing. The next morning all Claypole knew that Miss Porteus had been murdered, and by afternoon the whole of England knew. The reporter from the Argus, the local paper, came rushing round to see me before seven o’clock. ‘Give me it,’ he said. ‘Give me it before they get here. I’m on lineage for the Express and I’ll rush it through. Just the bare facts. What you saw. I’ll write it.’ So I made a statement. It was just a plain statement, and every word of it was true.
Then just before dinner I saw three men with cameras on the opposite side of the street. They took pictures of Miss Porteus’s shop, and then they came across the road into my shop. They as good as forced their way through the shop, into the back-yard, and there they photographed Miss Porteus’s bathroom window. Then one of the cameramen put a pound note into my hand and said, ‘On top of the ladder?’ The ladder was still there and I climbed up and they photographed me on top of it, pointing at the window.
By afternoon the crowd was packed thick right across the street. They were pressed tight against my window. I put the shutters up. Just as I was finishing them, four men came up and said they were newspaper-men and could I give them the facts about Miss Porteus?
Before I could speak they pushed into the shop. They shut the door. Then I saw that there were not four of them but twelve. I got behind the counter and they took out notebooks and rested them on my glass show-cases and scribbled. I tried to tell them what I had told the local man, the truth, and nothing more or less than the truth, but they didn’t want that. They hammered me with questions.
What was Miss Porteus like? Was her real name Porteus? What else beside Porteus? What colour was her hair? How long had she been there? Did it strike me as funny that an actress should run a milliner’s shop? When had I last seen the lady? About the bathroom – about her hair –
I was flustered and I said something about her hair being a little reddish, and one of the newspaper men said:
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Carrots,’ and they all laughed.
Then another said: ‘Everybody says this woman was an actress. But where did she act? London? What theatre? When?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You’ve lived next door all this time and don’t know? Did you never hear anybody say if she’d been in any particular play?’
‘No. I – Well, she was a bit strange.’
‘Strange?’ They seized on that. ‘How? What? Mysterious?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘she was the sort of woman who’d come out in big heavy fox furs on a hot summer day. She was different.’
‘Crazy?’
‘Oh! No.’
‘Eccentric?’
‘No. I wouldn’t say that.’
‘About her acting,’ they said. ‘You must have heard something.’
‘No.’ Then I remembered something. At a rehearsal of the Choral Society, once, her name had come up and somebody had said something about her having been in Othello. I remembered it because there was some argument about whether Othello was a pure black or just a half-caste.
‘Othello?’ The newspaper-men wrote fast. ‘What was she? Desdemona?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you ought to put that in. I don’t know if it’s strictly true or not. I can’t vouch for it. I don’t think – ’
‘And this man that was seen,’ they said. ‘When was it? When did you see him? What was he like?’
I said I didn’t know, that I hadn’t seen him, but that my wife had. So they had my wife in. They questioned her. They were nice to her. But they put down, as in my case, things she did not say. Yellow tie? Dark? How dark? Foreign-looking? Actor? Every now and then one of them dashed out to the post office. They questioned us all that afternoon.
The next morning the placards of the morning newspapers were all over Claypole. ‘Shot Actress – Full Story.’ It was my story, but somehow, as it appeared in the papers, it was not true. I read all the papers. They had my picture, the picture of Miss Porteus’s shop, looking somehow strange an
d forlorn with its drawn blind, and a picture of Miss Porteus herself, as she must have looked about 1920. All over these papers were black stabbing headlines: ‘Search for Shot Actress Assailant Goes On.’ ‘Police anxious to Interview Foreigner with Yellow Tie.’ ‘Real Life Desdemona: Jealousy Victim?’ ‘Eccentric Actress Recluse Dead in Bathroom.’ ‘Mystery Life of Actress who wore Furs in Heat Wave.’ ‘Beautiful Red-haired Actress who Spoke to Nobody.’ ‘Disappearance of Dark-looking Foreigner.’
It was Saturday. That afternoon Claypole was besieged by hundreds of people who had never been there before. They moved past Miss Porteus’s shop and mine in a great stream, in cars and on foot and pushing bicycles, staring up at the dead actress’s windows. They climbed in over the fence of my back-garden and trampled on the flower-beds, until the police stopped them. Towards evening the crowd was so thick outside, in the front, that I put the shutters up again, and by six o’clock I closed the shop. The police kept moving the crowd on, but it was no use. It swarmed out of the High Street into the side street and then round by the back streets until it came into High Street again. Hundreds of people who had seen Miss Porteus’s shop every day of their lives suddenly wanted to stare at it. They came to stare at the sun-faded blinds, just like any other shop blinds, as though they were jewelled; they fought to get a glimpse of the frosted pane of Miss Porteus’s bathroom. All the tea shops in Claypole that day were crowded out.
We had reporters and photographers and detectives tramping about the house and the garden all that day and the next. That Sunday morning I missed going to chapel, where I used to sing tenor in the choir, for the first time for almost ten years. My wife could not sleep and she was nervously exhausted and kept crying. The Sunday newspapers were full of it again: the pictures of poor Miss Porteus, the shop, the bathroom window, my shop, the headlines. That afternoon the crowds began again, thicker than ever, and all the tea shops which normally did not open on Sunday opened and were packed out. A man started to sell souvenir photographs of Claypole High Street in the streets at threepence each, and it was as though he were selling pound notes or bits of Miss Porteus’s hair. The sweet-shops opened and you saw people buying Claypole rock and Claypole treacle toffee, which is a speciality of the town. The police drafted in extra men and right up to ten o’clock strange people kept going by, whole families, with children, in their Sunday clothes, staring up at Miss Porteus’s windows, with mouths open.
That afternoon I went for a walk, just for a few minutes, to get some air. Everybody I knew stopped me and wanted to talk, and one man I knew only slightly stopped me and said, ‘What she look like, in the nightgown? See anything?’ Another said: ‘Ah, you don’t tell me she lived there all alone for nothing. I know one man who knew his way upstairs. And where there’s one you may depend there’s others. She knew her way about.’
The inquest was held on the Monday. It lasted three days. My wife and I were witnesses and it came out, then, that Miss Porteus’s name was not Porteus at all, but Helen Williams. Porteus had been her stage name. It came out also that there was a conflict of opinion in the medical evidence, that it was not clear if Miss Porteus had been murdered or if she had taken her life. It was a very curious, baffling case, made more complicated because the man with the yellow tie had not been found, and the jury returned an open verdict.
All this made it much worse. The fact of Miss Porteus having had two names gave her an air of mystery, of duplicity, and the doubts about her death increased it. There sprang up, gradually, a different story about Miss Porteus. It began to go all over Claypole that she was a woman of a certain reputation, that the milliner’s shop was a blind. ‘Did you ever see anybody in there, or going in? No, nor did anybody else. Did anybody ever buy a hat there? No. But the back door was always undone.’ That rumour gave cause for others. ‘Sprake,’ people began to say, ‘told me himself that she lay on the floor naked. They put the nightgown on afterwards.’ Then she became not only a woman of light virtue and naked, but also pregnant. ‘That’s why,’ people began to say, ‘she either shot herself or was shot. Take it which way you like. But I had it straight from Sprake.’
As the story of Miss Porteus grew, the story of my own part in it grew. Business had been very bad and for three days, because of the inquest, I had had to close the shop, but suddenly people began to come in. They looked out old watches and clocks that needed repairing, brooches that had been out of fashion for years and needed remodelling, and they brought them in; they came in to buy watches, knick-knacks, ash-trays, bits of jewellery, clocks, anything. A man asked for an ash-tray with Claypole church on it as a souvenir.
By the week-end I was selling all the souvenirs I could lay hands on. The shop was never empty. I took my meals standing up and by the end of the day my wife and I were worn out by that extraordinary mad rush of business. We rested in bed all day on Sunday, exhausted. Then on Monday it all began again, not quite so bad, but almost. We were besieged by people coming in, ostensibly to buy something, but in reality on the chance of hearing me say something about Miss Porteus’s death. I was in a dilemma: I wanted to close the shop and end it all, but somehow it wasn’t possible. Business is business and death is death and you’ve got to live. And so I kept open.
Then the police came to see me again. The man with the yellow tie had not been found and they wanted my wife and me to go to the station to check the statements we had given. We shut the shop and drove to the station in a taxi. We were there three hours. When we got back there was a crowd of fifty people round the shop, murmuring and pushing and arguing among themselves. The rumour had gone round that the police had arrested me.
Once that rumour had begun, nothing could stop its consequences. It was a rumour that never quite became tangible. It drifted about like smoke. It was there, but you could never grasp it. No one would really say anything, but the rumour was all over Claypole that I knew more than I would say. With one rumour went others: it began to be said that my wife and I were busybodies, Nosy-Parkers. How else had we come to be squinting into Miss Porteus’s bathroom? How else had we seen the man with the yellow tie in the back-yard? We were Peeping-Toms. I never heard anyone say this. But it was there. I saw it in people’s faces: I felt it. I felt it as plainly as a man feels the change of weather in an old wound.
But there was one thing I did hear them say. I used to belong, in Claypole, to a Temperance Club, the Melrose; we had four full-sized billiard tables and in the evenings I went there to play billiards and cards, to have a smoke and a talk and so on. Next to the billiard-room was a small cloak-room, and one evening, as I was hanging up my coat, I heard someone at the billiard table say:
‘Old Sprake knows a thing or two. Think I should be here if I had as many quid as times old Sprake’s been upstairs next door? Actress, my eye. Some act. Pound a time. Ever struck you it was funny old Sprake knew the colour of that nightgown so well?’
I put on my coat again and went out of the club. I was trembling and horrified and sick. What I had heard seemed to be the crystallization of all the rumours that perhaps were and perhaps were not going round Claypole. It may have been simply the crystallization of my own fears. I don’t know. I only know that I felt that I was suspected of things I had not done and had not said; that not only was Miss Porteus a loose woman but that I had had illicit relations with her; that not only was she pregnant but that I, perhaps, had had something to do with that pregnancy; that not only had she been murdered, but that I knew more than I would say about that murder. I was harassed by fears and counter fears. I did not know what to do.
And all the time that mad rush of customers went on. All day people would be coming in to buy things they did not want, just on the off-chance of hearing me say something about Miss Porteus’s death, or of asking me some questions about her life. It was so tiring and irritating that I had to defend myself from it. So I hit upon the idea of saying the same thing to everybody.
‘I just don’t know,’ I would say. I said it to everyone. Ju
st that: ‘I just don’t know.’
I suppose I must have said those words hundreds of times a day. I suppose I often said them whether they were necessary or not. And when a man goes on repeating one sentence hundreds of times a day, for two or three weeks, it is only natural, perhaps, that people should begin to wonder about his sanity.
So it crept round Claypole that I was a little queer. One day I had to go to London on business and a man in the same compartment as myself said to another: ‘Take any murder you like. It’s always the work of somebody half-sharp, a maniac. Take that Claypole murder. Clear as daylight. The work of somebody loopy.’
That was not directed against me, but it stirred up my fears into a great ugly, lumpy mass of doubt and terror. I could not sleep. And when I looked into the glass, after a restless night, I saw a face made queer and wretched by the strain of unresolved anxieties. I felt that I could have broken down, in the middle of that rush of customers and questions and fears and rumours, and wept like a child.
Then something happened. It was important and it suddenly filled the front pages of the newspapers again with the mystery of Miss Porteus’s death. The police found the man with the yellow tie. It was a sensation.
The man was a theatrical producer named Prideaux and the police found him at Brighton. The fact that his name was French and that he was found at Brighton at once established him, in the public mind, as the murderer of Miss Porteus.
But he had an explanation. He had not come forward because, quite naturally, he was afraid. Miss Porteus was an old friend and her death, he said, had upset him terribly. It was true that he had seen Miss Porteus just before her death, because Miss Porteus had invited him to come and see her. She needed money; the millinery business was not paying its way. She feared bankruptcy and, according to Prideaux, had threatened to take her life. Prideaux promised to lend her some money and he was back in London early that evening. He proved it. The porter of his hotel could prove it. It was also proved that people had seen Miss Porteus, alive, walking out on the golf-course, as late as five o’clock that day. The hotel-porter could prove that Prideaux was in London by that time.