The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  Clambering over kit-bags and babies, Mr Thewless hurried back to his compartment – physically as mentally a shuttlecock in the swaying corridors of this interminable train. That the bearded man did stand to him in some profoundly malign relationship he was convinced; there was nothing shadowy or intermittent about this; he could feel as he stumbled and squeezed his way forward that the fellow’s eyes behind their bogus lenses were boring uncomfortably into his back. But around this there was only wild surmise. The boy was a fraud; with rather shaky logic, Mr Thewless felt him to be a traitor; the real Humphrey Paxton was in the hands of these same people who were plotting thus mysteriously around him and leading him this harassing and humiliating dance; action must be taken at once if he was not to be a mere cat’s-paw in the commission of an atrocious crime…

  The compartment was still empty. Mr Thewless entered it and sat down heavily in his seat. He had now been in a state of more or less continuous agitation for more than five hours – and to this the last half hour had stood as a sort of mounting climax. Such excitement told upon an elderly man. Not that Mr Thewless felt himself beaten. Nothing indeed was to be more remarkable about the whole history of these days than that he never felt himself to be precisely that. He was slow; he was bewildered; he was even irresolute at times. But Nature did appear to have given him the obstinate feeling that it was always possible to fight back.

  He took breath. And as he did so the bearded man entered the compartment. His expression was not easy to discern, but his manner had become amicable. ‘That’s done with, praise heaven!’ he rumbled, and fell to packing up his suspect fishing-rod.

  What was done with, presumably, was the journey, and Mr Thewless felt called upon to make some reply. ‘We are coming into Heysham?’ he asked. It went against the grain thus casually to converse with the enemy, but it might be as well to give no appearance of suspicion.

  ‘No, sir – that’s some way off yet.’ The bearded man dumped his pillar-box basket on the seat beside him. ‘The train stops at Morecambe first, and I myself go no further.’ The bearded man paused. ‘Having no occasion to,’ he added. Mr Thewless seemed definitely to discern an inflexion of sinister triumph in this. ‘Capital place for fishing, Morecambe. You can make an uncommonly big catch there.’

  Mr Thewless had no means of telling whether these words were literally true, but as pronounced by the bearded man he felt that they bore some sardonic secondary sense. And for a moment he found himself surprisingly near to random violence. Already, and by mere accident, he had knocked the bearded man’s glasses off. In this perhaps he had tasted blood. For he certainly felt now that it would be pleasing to set about this questionable fisherman and give him a bashing. It was a long time since he had cherished such an impulse towards a fellow man. Mr Thewless grabbed The Times and took shelter behind it once more. And in a matter of seconds the train had stopped and the bearded man had left the compartment.

  Mr Thewless dropped his paper, lowered the window, and looked anxiously out. If his charge had been the real Humphrey Paxton, and he had gone into hiding on the train, what more likely than that he should now be proposing to make a bolt for it? And, correspondingly, if his charge had been an impostor, was it not possible that the same thing was taking place? There might have been no plan to maintain a long-continued deception in Ireland; the criminals might feel that they had already been given sufficient grace. And Mr Thewless peered up and down the platform for signs of an absconding boy. But all he saw was the bearded man once more. The fellow had been joined by what appeared to be a private chauffeur, and this retainer was assisting a porter to unload something from the van. The light was poor at just that point, and Mr Thewless had for a moment the absurd impression that what the two men were grappling with was a coffin… But the reality, when he succeeded in distinguishing it, surprised him scarcely less. The bearded man, it appeared, was the owner of that swathed double bass which had kept the Fat Lady and the various circus creatures company in the guard’s van. The instrument was being extricated with considerable difficulty – almost as if it were heavy as well as bulky – and the bearded man (whose piscatorial paraphernalia looked doubly absurd in one now revealed as a devotee not of the naiads, but the muses) was superintending the operation with some anxiety. Even as Mr Thewless watched, however, the thing was accomplished, and the bearded man and his retinue made their way to a waiting car. To do so they had to pass close by once more, and upon seeing his late travelling companion the bearded man gave a cordial wave. ‘I hope you’ll have a good crossing!’ he called cheerfully, and was about to pass on. But an afterthought appeared to strike him, and he turned. ‘You and the boy, that is to say. Good night!’ He was gone. And at the same moment Miss Liberty re-entered the compartment.

  Mr Thewless had forgotten about her. But now he turned his eyes on her suspiciously – and noticed that hers were upon the retreating form of the bearded man. At once his suspicions grew. Between these people – and between these people and the boy – he felt some occult connexion. Perhaps this harmless-seeming female was being left as a sort of rearguard to keep an eye on him…

  But this was insanity. A more harmless type than Miss Liberty, with her trepidations over an exciting novel, it would be impossible to conceive. And to break the ridiculous spell which he felt growing upon him Mr Thewless spoke out. ‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘if you have seen my young companion? He has been missing for some time, and I am getting quite worried about him.’

  Miss Liberty withdrew her gaze into the compartment and directed it upon her interrogator. Since she wore no pebble glasses, it was possible to assess something of its quality. What Mr Thewless read in it was distrust. But it was not, he felt, a muzzy and generalized distrust, such as a mind seeped in sensational fiction might evince. It was rather the suspended judgement of one before whom he had by no means as yet passed some crucial examination. ‘Humphrey?’ said Miss Liberty. ‘I am sure he must be quite all right. Ah, we are moving again! A delightful boy, if I may say so, only perhaps a little highly-strung. He will be back any minute, I expect.’ She glanced towards the corridor. ‘Indeed, here he is.’

  It was certainly Humphrey – whether the true or the feigned. Without a glance at either of his companions, he pushed the door to and tumbled into his seat. He was deathly pale, breathing hard, and – it seemed to Mr Thewless – oddly crumpled. His eyes between their dark eyebrows and dark shadows held a brighter glitter than they had yet shown – a piercing gleam which might have been of fear or excitement or even anger. He curled himself up and his thumb stole towards his mouth; suddenly he straightened himself with a jerk, sat up, and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Is the next stop Heysham?’ he asked.

  Mr Thewless, who had been about to make some reference to his unaccountable disappearance during the past half hour, was startled by the voice, which was at once unnecessarily loud and trembling beneath some uncontrollable agitation. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We shall be there in a few minutes now.’

  ‘And go straight on board the steamer?’ The boy laughed – and his laugh was more disturbing still. ‘Do you believe in tests?’

  ‘Tests?’ Mr Thewless looked at him blankly.

  ‘I believe in tests.’ It was Miss Liberty who spoke.

  And the boy turned to her eagerly. ‘You don’t turn back?’

  ‘Not so long as something inside says to go forward.’

  ‘Not even if it’s all plainly going to be more than you bargained for?’

  ‘Not even then. To go on, you see, may make you. And to turn back may – well, may mar you quite.’

  ‘Is that from a poem?’

  Miss Liberty smiled. ‘I believe it is.’

  ‘From Shelley?’

  ‘No. But it is something that Shelley thoroughly believed in, I should say.’

  The boy peered out into the dark. As he did so the engine whistled, and the sound was eerie. He spoke without looking round, and in a strangely adult voice. ‘One may not be what
one dreams,’ he said. ‘I think I shall turn back.’ He wheeled upon Mr Thewless. ‘You may as well know–’ He hesitated and his glance wandered to Miss Liberty. ‘Is that right?’ he asked her.

  ‘It entirely depends on your inner mind.’

  ‘I see.’ The boy was silent. The engine hooted again and the train began to slow down. ‘One should have a sword upstairs,’ he said.

  Miss Liberty looked puzzled. ‘A sword upstairs?’

  ‘Yes. Even if one was going to be a poet one should have that.’ He sprang to his feet. ‘But at least I’ve got a gun!’ He climbed on the seat and brought down from the rack the mysterious parcel that had caused such perturbation at Euston. ‘The bump at the end must be some cartridges to be going on with. I say! We’ve stopped.’

  ‘This is Heysham.’

  ‘Then here goes.’ The boy’s face was lit up strangely. ‘Do you remember Protesilaus? He was first ashore at Troy, even though he’d had a warning. I think I’ll be first ashore at Heysham.’

  And the boy thrust open the carriage door and leapt out. Mr Thewless, who had sat through this odd talk in a sort of misdoubting daze, reached for luggage. Had his mind been more actively working, the queer experience of the next few seconds might not have come to him – or if it had come at all must have done so with modified effect. But the fact is that by this time Mr Thewless’ thinking had set into a groove of deepening suspicion. And in this mood the boy’s dark conversation with this foolish old woman appeared to him as no more than the impudent mystery-mongering of a young rascal conscious of playing the central part in a successful conspiracy – one which had led him, only a little time before, into horrid confabulation with the sinister bearded man in a lavatory.

  And so Mr Thewless’ mind was made up – so definitely so that he now opened his mouth and stretched out his arm with intent to denounce and apprehend the impostor. As he did so the boy, already on the platform, turned his head –

  Sound died upon Mr Thewless’ lips; his gesture froze. For this – just this – he had seen before. The bare-headed boy set in a sort of deep chiaroscuro by the harsh station light; the bare-headed boy glancing slantwise at him from beneath raven hair; the boy, thus lit and thus standing, grasping a gun…all this he had seen, fixed for ever by Velazquez, in Sir Bernard Paxton’s Spanish library. And that was why Sir Bernard had such a library – as a setting for a picture acquired because of its overpowering likeness to his cherished son. Humphrey had produced a passport after all, and one authenticated far more certainly than by any photograph.

  A sadder and a wiser man, Mr Thewless descended quietly to the platform. During these nightmarish five hours he had allowed the strange power of suggestion to carry him into a land of shadows, of figments as insubstantial as those in Miss Liberty’s romance. He had believed wonders. And now – and after a fashion strange enough – the simple truth had been restored to him. This was Sir Bernard Paxton’s son – a boy hopelessly submerged in highly-coloured fantasies, indeed, but in point of identity none other than he claimed to be. That the future held substantial difficulties was likely enough – but they were only those with which a competent leader of young bears might confidently look to cope.

  Mr Thewless took his hat off to Miss Liberty, made an authoritative gesture which secured him one of the few porters in evidence, and with Humphrey Paxton proceeded to board the night steamer for Belfast.

  8

  The queues had grown longer outside the Metrodrome. Emerging from the cinema, Inspector Cadover scowled at them as he strode away. Here were people unaware that at their back hurried Time’s wingéd chariot…people giving half an evening to nuzzling nearer to the armed, the arrogant, the amorous lady. And beyond that less than paper-thin illusion what awaited them? Deserts of vast eternity, Cadover told himself. Assuredly they would miss the Blonde. But they would get the Plutonium, likely enough, in its nastiest fissile form…

  At this point Inspector Cadover, an experienced Londoner, was nearly killed by a bus. In which case the laugh would have been distinctly with the folk in the queues, he thought. And it would have been awkward. For nobody else seemed to feel that in the death of this unknown man in a cinema there lay a challenge that was urgent.

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.

  The rhythm of the lines distorted itself as Cadover walked. I always hear, I always hear, I always hear…the words thumped themselves out in his brain like a phrase which one has fitted to the inescapable jolt of rails or pounding of pistons as one hurtles through the night in a train. But why think of a train…? Cadover’s eye fell upon that rare and blessed visitant of London streets, a cruising taxi. He hailed it. ‘Smith’s,’ he said.

  With the stump of the cigarette between his lips the driver gave a signal of comprehension. Cadover was pleased. He had been by no means certain that Smith’s possessed the sort of status that made possible the directing oneself to it in this monosyllabic way; that it was so appeared to lend slightly more colour to the possibility that this small restaurant was indeed what was pointed to in the dead man’s diary. How wretchedly meagre the entries that little book had contained! Cadover ran over them once more in his mind.

  Smith’s 7.30

  That had been a week last Tuesday. All the other entries belonged to the present week. On Monday there had been:

  Bolderwood

  Hump

  and on Wednesday:

  NI police re guns etc

  Light railway from Dundrane

  while the final entry was on Thursday – this very day, that was to say, on which the fellow had met his death. And it read:

  gun for boy 1.15

  For boy… It was conceivable that in a brief jotting a man might so indicate his son. ‘I must get the boy a gun.’ Yes, one could hear a father saying that. But the phrase as written down had another flavour. Was it a flavour suggesting a professional relationship? ‘That lad So-and-So had better have a gun.’ Was that it? A man whose initials were P C proposing to take a pupil or ward to Ireland, and as a first step proposing to get the boy a gun… A good deal in the way of inference might proceed from this. For example, a boy is not commonly given a shot-gun, surely, until he is about fifteen. And again, if he is so provided before a trip from London to Ireland there are economic, social, and even geographical implications; he is not going to take the thing to Dublin, for instance, for use on Stephen’s Green. But likely enough he will be taking a light railway from Dundrane – and travelling first-class should such distinctions carry so far into the wilds of Ireland.

  Again, there was a point there. The west of Ireland was not like the highlands of Scotland, a rich man’s playground into which there poured at this time of year the residue of England’s plutocracy. It was country really remote still; and of such large houses as it had once possessed many were now ruins or burnt-out shells. One might, of course, go off with guns to stay at an hotel, but if P C had been taking the boy to stay with landed folk approached by a light railway from Dundrane the hunt from that direction might not be altogether hopeless. But assuredly it would take time… And here was Smith’s. Cadover jumped from the taxi.

  It was a small restaurant which he had not entered for years. From the outside it looked shabby enough and he eyed it gloomily. The probability was that like many of its kind it had tumbled hopelessly downhill and that its only pronounced feature would be in a tacit, dogged denial – hanging heavy in the air as the smell of synthetic gravy – that the human palate exists. But this – Cadover told himself conscientiously – was neither here nor there, except as it might affect the probability of the dead man’s frequenting the place. He pushed open the door and entered.

  Smith’s, he saw, had gone in for being discreet. Partitions, alcoves, and the sort of lighting that is described as subdued appeared to be its chief selling-point. Behind decaying palms elderly and besotted men argued with elderly and anxious women; younger women were paired tensely in corners; here
and there youths given over to ignoble calculation pressed chianti or what was doubtless execrable brandy upon predatory girls. Over these futilities presided a frock-coated proprietor and half a dozen waiters so softly and sinisterly confidential as to suggest that they kept unnamable horrors conveniently disposed in an annex at the back. Actually, thought Cadover, all one would find there would be black-market butter and a quantity of illicit horseflesh in process of being transmogrified into venison. He sat down and ordered something out of a tin. Nobody was near him except two undergraduates in démodé polo-jumpers, endeavouring before two revolting-looking troughs of minestrone to preserve that sacramental attitude to exotic foods publicized in the writings of Mr Evelyn Waugh. Cadover beckoned the proprietor.

  ‘I am from Scotland Yard and engaged upon an inquiry in which it is possible that you can help me. Have you a regular customer – a young man with the appearance of an Army officer – whose initials are P C?’

  The proprietor looked blank. ‘We don’t often know their names,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, come. In a restaurant like this you must have a great many habitués – people who dine here quite regularly.’

  The proprietor looked as if he would like to have the hardihood to declare that this was indeed so. But he was a man whom discouragement was beginning to render indifferent and therefore almost honest. ‘Well, we don’t have so many of that sort as we once had. People have become very floating – very floating, indeed. Of course there are people who ring up and book tables fairly often.’ The proprietor paused, as if he suddenly saw that there was something rather odd in this. ‘Yes, people do book tables and give names. Browns, mostly. You’d be surprised at the number of Browns who dine at Smith’s. But I can’t place your P C. Sounds like a postcard, don’t it?’