Nothing But the Night

by John Blackburn

  ‘Very well, Peter.’ Marcus Levin had nodded when the tape finally ended and that weeping, whimpering, some­times screaming voice with its tale of fire and pain had become silent. ‘I agree that the child does appear to be in great distress and I’ll cover up as you ask. I will state that Mary is suffering from some nervous allergy which I am unable to identify and sign a recommendation that she should remain in quarantine till the rash has cleared up. That should get you a six-day receiving order. Good luck, Peter.’

  Marcus had touched his hand briefly and walked out of the flat without another word.

  Yes, so far things were going well. The Van Traylen Fellowship had demanded a second opinion, but their man had confirmed Marcus’s findings and the order was made. He had another four days and nights to discover the thing which slept in Mary’s mind and racked her when it woke. Tonight might give him the first clue to its identity.

  But what a short time it was and so far he’d got nowhere. A child who appeared completely normal on the surface but during sleep or under narco-analysis was shown to be very ill indeed. A recurrent dream of fire and bellowing animals and a door growing red. And all described in detail which made it unlikely she was merely repeating a story which she had read or had had repeated to her. Haynes recalled a case reported in Paris before the war. An Indian labourer had been operated on for a brain tumour. The man’s family had lived in France for genera­tions and French was known to be his only conscious language. Yet, while under the influence of the anaesthetic he had suddenly begun to rave in fluent Hindi. Could Mary Valley be dreaming of something which had hap­pened to one of her ancestors years ago? Peter Haynes considered himself a humanist, but every minute he had spent with Mary had given him the uncomfortable feeling that it might take a priest rather than a doctor to help her.

  Thames Vale. The train drew up at a station which was still in Greater London, but the weeping trees and a border of rhododendrons alongside the platform made it look as if he were in the depths of the country. Only three other passengers alighted—two young women and a grotesquely fat man in an astrakhan coat—and the ticket collector gave Haynes his directions in detail. ‘Straight on till you come to the Crown Hotel, then left as far as Saint Mark’s Church where you go left again. Saint Mark’s, mind, not Saint Mary’s, or you’ll be in trouble. Carry on from the church till you see Mason’s Stores at the next corner, and then branch right to the Bull and Bear public house . . .’ Haynes was soon out of his depth in local topography, but he gathered that if he walked in the general direction of the river all would be well.

  Yes, it was a foul evening and the night would be worse. Cold and dark with the mist thickening over every suburban garden and clinging around the street lamps like fur. A real Dickensian evening for Bill Sykes or Daniel Quilp to be going about their sinister businesses.

  ‘A wild animal tamed.’ That was how Dickens had described Mr Jaggers’s housekeeper, and he might be on his way to meet a very similar person: a woman with convictions for larceny, prostitution and assault before she was nineteen and a triple murderess before her twenty-first birthday. All the same she was the one person who might help him to understand Mary’s condition and it was an extraordinary piece of luck that he had managed to trace her so quickly thanks to his next-door neighbour, a retired C.I.D. inspector named Milton.

  Anna Harb was a mulatto and, as Milton remarked, ‘No oil painting even when she was young,’ though she made a success of prostitution and supported a ponce named Alfie Bates whom she adored. Alfie, on the other hand, had grown weary of her neurotic moods and rather sinister charms and had deserted her for a Greek hostess in a club called the Blue Heaven in Soho.

  A kind friend told her where they could be found and somehow Anna managed to obtain a .32 automatic. Armed with this and fifteen tablets of drinamyl, she went round to the club and pumped lead into Bates and Miss Kypragoros till the pistol was empty. In the course of the action an unfortunate barman received a ricochet through the centre of his forehead and Anna was sent to Broadmoor for life. But ten years later a team of visiting psychiatrists re-examined her case, the Home Secretary was impressed by their findings and she was released.

  ‘You want to talk to her, Mr Haynes?’ Milton had said when he questioned him in the saloon bar of their local public house. ‘Then just fetch the “E” to “K” telephone directory from the booth and we’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘Thanks. My guess is that she’ll be listed in here all right.’ The inspector had put on his spectacles and started to flip through the book. ‘Most killers change their names when they come out, but not Madame Harb who set her­self up as a clairvoyant and fortune-teller. Probably a lot of nuts like to have their hands read by a convicted mur­deress and it’s good for business. Yes, here you are, and I will have just one more pint for the road, as you’re so kind.’

  Larceny, assault, prostitution, murder. The mother of a fair-haired child who had been removed from her care and placed in an orphanage. A little girl who dreamed of fire and tortured animals and who might . . . just might have jabbed a lighted cigarette into the face of a coach driver named Frank Reynolds.

  ‘Penny for the guy. Spare a penny for the guy.’ The street had opened up into a dank grassy square and three small boys loomed before him. They had with them a perambulator occupied by a grotesque figure wearing a cardboard mask and an old bowler hat.

  ‘I’ll make it a shilling if you can tell me how to get to the Rose and Crown.’ Peter Haynes had little sympathy with the burning of the frustrated assassin, but he was completely lost.

  ‘The Rose, guv’?’ A grimy hand snatched the coin from his grasp. ‘Go right across the Green here, and then turn left at the end towards the river where you’ll see the fair­ground, though it’s closed. All shut down for the winter. The pub’s just beyond there.

  ‘Penny for the guy, sir. Spare a penny for the guy.’ The stout man he had seen at the station rounded a corner and the boys turned their attention to him.

  The fairground was closed all right. It lay on a strip of wasteland at the edge of the river with a faded sign announcing ‘Fred Mison’s Carnival Attractions’, but there was not a light showing from the caravans and roundabouts and boarded-up booths, though one of the roundabouts was not yet covered by a tarpaulin and its horses’ heads sneered out at him through the mist. Somewhere down­stream a tug bellowed twice and there was a plume of amber flame from the gas-works on the opposite bank. The scene was not so much sinister as sad and depressing, and only one thing relieved the gloom: a brightly lit public house beyond the fair which was his destination.

  ‘Now, sir, what will yours be?’ The Irish barman was very young but he handled the drink and change like a veteran. The saloon lounge was only half full and in some other part of the building an old-time dance was in pro­gress. The ceiling shook with the crash of feet and a noisy rendering of the Lancers.

  Haynes was early for his appointment and he carried his glass to a corner table and studied his fellow customers to pass the time. They were a typical Saturday evening suburban crowd, a sprinkling of young couples but on the whole more men than women, more middle-aged and elderly people than young, more drinking beer than wines and spirits. The scene was cosy and friendly and pleasant till the door opened and the woman he had come to meet walked into the room. Behind her, moving with a smooth, sliding gait as if castors were screwed to the soles of his shoes, was the fat man from the station.

  ‘The child is dead, Doctor. They stole my Mary from me, the welfare authorities and the police, and they gave her to those people to kill her.’ Half an hour had passed and Anna Harb had finished her third double gin. She was a big, powerful woman with features as coarse as those of the cardboard guy Haynes had seen in the pram. Her fortune-telling business looked as if it paid well because her fur coat was black musquash and the long pin that held her hat in position was topped by a red stone which Haynes fancied was an Indian ruby.

  ‘I have the second sight, Do
ctor. I make my living by what the ignorant call fortune-telling, and I know that Mary is dead and that is why they would not allow me into the hospital.’

  ‘She is alive and physically well, Mrs Harb, but she needs your help badly.’ Haynes forced himself to smile at the heavy face and shake his head at the constant repeti­tions. The noise of the dance thundered down through the ceiling, the room was hot and full of smoke and his head ached. The fat man had not been with Anna Harb, as he had first thought, but was standing by the bar with a liqueur glass almost hidden in his great, flabby hand and surveying the assembled company with an expression of amused contempt.

  ‘So you keep telling me, Doctor, and I will believe you when I see her.’ The woman slipped back the coat, showing a low-cut dress and shoulders which were as muscular as a strong man’s.

  ‘You say that my daughter is obsessed by fire and dreams about flames and dying animals, that she may have caused a man’s death because he lit a cigarette in her presence,’ Anna Harb suddenly shook with laughter. ‘Like mother like daughter, eh? A real chip off the old block, though I did better—I killed two men and a thing which called itself a woman. For over ten years I rotted in a stinking asylum till some nice kind gentlemen like yourself came and said I was sane and should be released. They let me out because of that, and I will always be grateful to your profession, Doctor. Even more grateful when you have filled my glass.’

  ‘Of course.’ Haynes crossed to the bar, glad of a brief respite. Apart from her grotesque appearance there was something repellent about the woman’s personality which he had noticed the moment she had entered the room. It was like being with a big cat which remained contented as long as it were fed and constantly stroked. Hold back the food, though, withdraw the hand which gave pleasure and the claws would come out. He could quite understand her success as a fortune-teller. People respect those they fear, and Anna Harb had that rare quality, an element of terror.

  ‘Another double gin please.’ He waited for the barman to serve him. Some customers had left or moved their places and others had come in. Only the fat man remained com­pletely stationary, surveying the room from his vantage point at the end of the bar as if studying a cageful of apes.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’ Anna Harb took the glass from him, the light winking on the ruby pin as she bent forward to drink.

  ‘But why should Mary be obsessed with fire? We had no open fires in the caravan; only a gas stove and electric heating. Such a nice caravan it is and Mary was happy there with me. Sometimes her father would come to visit us. He is a Danish seaman with a wife in Copenhagen, but his ship was often in the Thames.

  ‘Mary could have been taught my powers, too. I would have shown her the gift of the second sight and the way to look into the future.’ A tear suddenly trickled down the dark cheek and she looked away from him. ‘So much I could have done for my daughter, but they took her away from me. They said I was an unfit person to have care of a child because I was too fond of men. Is that a sin, Doctor Haynes?’

  ‘Not a sin, though it may be disturbing for a small child.’ A gift of second sight. Had the training for that been the original cause of Mary’s sickness? Haynes considered what her lessons might have been. Drugs and hunger to produce hallucinations, hours spent in a dark cupboard or staring at the ink pool in the palm from which visions might appear. Added to such experience there would have been the constant stream of visitors. Strange men’s faces on the pillow and the mother’s beside them. ‘This is your new Uncle Dick . . . or Gustav . . . or Kurt, Mary. Come and give him a kiss, darling.’

  ‘But why do you keep repeating that the child is dead, Mrs Harb? I give you my word that she is alive and physically well.’

  ‘Because I have seen her, Doctor Haynes. When that party of children came to London there was a newspaper story about it and a picture of them outside the hotel. It said how happy and fortunate they were and how some kind old people had renovated this lovely house in Scotland and prepared for their futures. I went round to that hotel and I waited outside. After an hour the children came out and I saw my daughter.’ The woman lifted her glass again. She drank as if performing some strange ritual, and Haynes had noticed that it took her exactly three mouthfuls to empty each measure.

  ‘Did she see you? Recognize you?’ he asked, wondering if that were another link in the story—a sudden confronta­tion with the mother Mary had not seen for almost three years.

  ‘No, but I saw her. I looked right into Mary’s eyes and they told me her future. You may sneer at the super­natural, but I could read her destiny as clearly as print. It was ordained that Mary must die and the people who stole her from me were to be her executioners.’

  ‘I have never sneered at the supernatural, but Mary is alive, Mrs Harb, and being well looked after.’ Haynes lit a cigarette to conceal his feelings of impotence, and from the bar he saw the fat man raise his eyebrows as if the apes had performed some indecent antic. Giles Caitlin was the chief of the psychiatrists who had pressed for Anna Harb’s release and he must have been crazy to do so. The woman was clearly paranoic and still potentially dangerous.

  ‘Then you read about the coach accident, and when they refused to let you see her at the hospital you got the idea that she was dead. Tomorrow morning I shall take you to Saint Bede’s and prove that she is alive.’ He suddenly felt drained of strength as he made the decision. The shock of seeing her mother might give him a clue to Mary Valley’s condition but it might also disturb her badly.

  ‘And only then will I believe you.’ The dark face was quite without expression, but her eyes stared straight into his with the terrible self-assurance of the insane. ‘All the same, let us admit that she is alive for the sake of argument.’ Anna Harb took her third and final drink of gin and pushed aside the empty glass.

  ‘She dreams about a little room in a burning building, you say, Doctor? The door is red with heat and, outside, animals are being roasted to death. Where would my little girl have experienced such a thing?

  ‘Very well, in the morning we shall go to the hospital, but tell me one thing now. You didn’t think of Mary as just an ordinary patient, did you? There was something about her that frightened you.’

  ‘We all fear things which we do not understand.’ Haynes had noted the use of the past tense, but the woman spoke the truth. Every minute he had listened to that small voice whimpering from the pillow, every time he had played back the tape-recording had made him more and more con­vinced that his theory of racial archetypes was the only one that fitted. The memory of something that had hap­pened a long time ago was running through the mind of a child and it horrified him.

  ‘But tomorrow we will see Mary together and you may help me to understand her condition.’

  ‘We will do that, Doctor, if she is alive.’ Anna Harb lifted her coat from the chair and stood up, but she made no move towards the door. She stood smiling at him and there was a magnetic quality in her eyes and her face and her whole body; a perverse attraction which made him understand her success as a prostitute. In spite of his earlier revulsion Haynes felt a sudden flush of animal desire for her.

  ‘Now, let’s forget little Mary and enjoy ourselves, Doctor. There is a bar upstairs which stays open till the dance ends at midnight. We will go there and drink together and you will dance with me. Then, after a time, you will not find me as unattractive as you do now.’ A hand which had killed three human beings gripped his and she led him towards the staircase at the end of the room. Just before they reached it, she turned and smiled at him again.

  ‘You will like me, Dr Haynes, that is a promise, but here is another: if you have lied to me, if I find that my girl is dead, I shall kill you.’

  ‘Clark’s Hotel. Is Lord Michael Fawnlee still staying with you, please? Thank you.’ At the moment Anna Harb had started to lead Haynes up to the dance, the fat man had glided out of the bar and was now standing in a telephone booth.

  ‘Good evening, my name is Forest . . . John Forest . .
. and I wish to speak to Lord Fawnlee on a matter of some urgency.’ Another voice had taken over from the operator and Forest pronounced his name as though it were as noteworthy as Shakespeare or Napoleon.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ There had been a slight pause before the secretary spoke again and when he had finished Forest’s sagging face flushed with anger.

  ‘Your employer says that he has not heard of me and is not in the habit of accepting telephone calls from strangers? Then please tell him he should read the Daily Echo and that my business concerns a child who is supposed to be in his care.’ Forest had been put out by the rebuff and he searched for a reprisal.

  ‘Tell him to come to the phone at once please.’ He remembered that Fawnlee was an active campaigner for total abstinence and the reprisal came to him. ‘Providing that the old gentleman is sober enough to carry on a rational conversation, of course.’

  Chapter Four

  Michael Fawnlee was old and tired and he couldn’t feel real anger nowadays. He had been irritated by Forest, but not annoyed because it was years since he had ex­perienced any emotion except deep anxiety. He leaned wearily back in his chair, and as he listened to his visitor the memories of the long life which had made him what he was ran through his mind like water dripping from a tap.

  Money and business and sweat, he thought. The know­ledge that the first thousand was safely lodged in the bank and he could start on his own. The fun of planning and gambling and bargaining and watching one business grow into an empire; iron and shipping on Tyneside, jute mills in Glasgow, motor vehicles in the Midlands and two mer­chant banks in the City of London. It had been a bene­volent empire though, he reassured himself. Not one of his companies had ever been hit by a serious strike and no employee had been deliberately made redundant.