The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  Then there were those instructions to be closely studied, or there was the cyanide.

  They sat over dinner for a long time, still not talking much, yet both of them, in a strange harmony, seeming to want to make the meal stretch out for as long as possible. She had brought out a bottle of the claret that they usually kept only for special occasions, and when the pheasant and the cheese were done, they sat sipping the wine slowly, and after it coffee and brandy, occasionally exchanging a few remarks about people whom they had seen that day and things that they must do tomorrow, then lapsing again into silence.

  Once he had a startling illusion that the brightness of her eyes came from tears. But he had no sooner incredulously thought this, than she had put a hand to her eyes, yawned and said she was very tired and would go to bed early. At last they cleared the table together, stacked the dishwasher, she kissed him gently and went up to bed. He sensed that it was a part of her strange mood that night that she did not want him to follow her.

  Going to his study, he switched on the table lamp on his desk, which only half-illuminated the rest of the room, opened the drawer where he kept the very important little packet that contained the cyanide, and holding it in his hand, unopened, sat down in a chair that was almost in shadow and fell into a kind of dream. It was strangely painless and timeless. Life or death? Life of a kind of which he knew nothing, or death of which he knew even less? Occasionally his mind wandered to all that might have been if everything had been different. If he had been a different man. And through it all he remembered clearly that he had a letter to write. That could not be avoided.

  At last he stood up, sat down at the desk and began to write. He wrote in long hand as the noise of the typewriter might have kept Rosemary awake. He wanted the letter to be brief, but he soon found there was so much to say that it would cover two or three pages. He wanted to tell the exact truth, without extenuation. He had made one or two false starts before suddenly his pen seemed to take charge of his hand and he found himself writing fluently and easily. When it was done he put the letter in an envelope, wrote Rosemary upon it and laid it down beside his typewriter. Then he carefully set a light to the pages that he had discarded, watching them until he could pound them into ash in the fireplace, put the cyanide back in the drawer from which he had taken it, then went softly up to bed.

  Rosemary was asleep, or at least wanted him to think that she was. When he slid as quietly as he could into the bed beside her he had a feeling that she was as wide awake as he was. But to his own surprise he had no desire to touch her. If once he did it would stir feelings in him that he could not endure and he would be lost. He lay there, aching and motionless a few inches away from her for several hours, until at last, towards morning, he drifted off to sleep.

  It was a deep sleep when it came, and he did not hear her get up. She usually got up before he did, got breakfast for herself and drove off to her work while he was only shaving and dressing. This morning was just as usual. By the time that he came downstairs to drink the coffee that she had left for him on the stove, she had left the house.

  On the whole, it made things easier. Not that he had any packing to do at which she would have wondered if she had seen it. He had been told expressly not to take any luggage, only his usual briefcase. He had also been told not to take his passport and that he need not concern himself about money. It and a new passport would be provided when he was handed his ticket. Meanwhile he had only to drive into Reading, leaving his car in the station car park, just as if he were going to spend a day in London, as he often did, and then he was to get on to the bus for Heathrow. It occurred to him as he drove towards Reading that the car park might be full. However, just as he drove into it, another car backed out of a space near the entrance and he was able to turn into it immediately. A convenient accident, or perhaps something arranged? He did not yet know the rules of the new life to which he had committed himself when he found that he had not the courage to swallow the cyanide. It might be difficult to learn them without becoming an idiot paranoic, feeling watching eyes upon him everywhere.

  Compared with the evening before he felt strangely relaxed and calm. On the bus-trip to Heathrow he thought about Rosemary, wondering what her true feelings would be when she read his letter. He could not guess. It was curious to realize, considering how long their love had lasted and how deep it had been for eight whole years, how little they had ever known about one another. But it could do no harm, he thought, once he was satisfactorily settled in his new life, to write to her and suggest that she should join him. Wives were often allowed to join defecting husbands. So perhaps, if her love were what it had seemed to be the evening before, she would come to him when he sent for her and they need not be separated for ever.

  Then all of a sudden an appalling thought struck him. Suppose his letter filled her with despair. He had left that packet of cyanide in the drawer of his desk...

  His calm was shattered, and desperately as he tried to regain it, because it was very important now that he should make no mistake, he was still in the grip of an icy chill when the bus arrived at Heathrow.

  The thing that he had been expecting to happen sometime in the next hour or so happened actually just before he left the bus. A woman who had been on it all the way from Reading and who had put a plastic shopping-bag on the rack above his head, reached up for it just as he was about to get up and make his way to the exit, and in pulling it down, spilled its contents, a number of odd parcels, over him and on to the floor. He stooped to help her retrieve them and found one of them pressed into his hand. He understood at once what he was supposed to do and slipped it swiftly into his briefcase. In the airport he went to the men’s lavatory and examined what the parcel contained. There was a passport, there was a ticket, there was money, some of it English, some of it foreign currency. The ticket told him the number and the time of his flight. There was some time to wait, so he went to the bookstall and bought copies of The Economist and Scientific American, had a cup of coffee, then made his way through passport control without any difficulty and into the departure lounge.

  Almost the first person he saw there was Rosemary.

  She did not see him. She was looking towards the flight indicator and her face was half-turned away from him. He could see only her glossy black hair and the line of her jaw. But even if he had been able to see still less he could never have made any mistake about her. He knew every line of her head and of her slightly stooping shoulders as she sat, clutching a handbag, in a row of other people who were watching the indicator. He even knew the old raincoat that she was wearing and the silk scarf at her throat.

  A spasm of fear and anger gripped him. This had not been in the plan. He did not approach her, but moved quickly to where she would not be able to see him even if she turned her head. This put him, unfortunately, in a position where he could not see the indicator himself, so that he would be compelled to listen to the unintelligible messages that came booming out from the loudspeakers every few minutes, and hope that he would be able to make out his flight number when it was called.

  He made a guess at what must have happened to bring her here. She must for once have gone into his study before she left for work, a thing she seldom did and which he had assumed that she would not do when he had left his letter to her beside his typewriter. Then she must have come here expressly to stop him going away.

  He realized that he was shaking. Her action put him in fearful danger. Even now there might be men on his track who would approach him quietly, if she managed to delay him, and ask him to be so good as to go with them and answer a few questions. He looked wildly round the lounge, wondering if they were there already. But even if they were, of course they would make themselves inconspicious until he moved towards the exit doors to board his plane. What a fool he had been to write that letter. Even now, when he knew that she must have found it and read it, it seemed to him incredible that she should have so little regard for his safety as to come here jus
t to prevent his escape.

  Then he realized that he was wrong. He must be. That could not be what had happened. For if she had found a letter from him and addressed to herself lying on the desk in his study, surely a curious thing to find at any time, would she not have opened it at once, read it on the spot, and if she wanted to stop him leaving, come straight upstairs to their bedroom and pleaded with him not to go. Might she not even have pleaded with him to take her with him?

  A new thought struck him. Was that why she was here now, not to stop him, but hoping to go with him? Some of his anger melted, though not his fear. Of course it would be impossible for him to take her, for above all he must stick meticulously to his instructions or the people on whose help he was counting would wash their hands of him. Yet it moved him profoundly to think that that might be the explanation of why she was here. He almost got up from the seat he had taken out of sight of her to go hurrying over to her, to take her in his arms just once more, to give her one more kiss. But then once more he realized that he was wrong. That could not be what had happened.

  He had not told her anything in his letter about his plans for his departure. That had been simply for her own safety. When she showed the letter to the authorities, as sooner or later she would have to, it would be some protection for her if she could prove that she could not have known how to stop him, even if she had wanted to. Yet here she was, armed, it was to be supposed, with her passport and a ticket to somewhere or other, or she could not have got through into the departure lounge, when she could not possibly have known when to expect him. So was it the real truth that her presence here had nothing to do with him at all?

  He began to think about the dinner the evening before, the pheasant, the wine, the flowers, her newly done hair, his favourite dress, and the sweet yet somehow melancholy sense of companionship that had pervaded it. It had had the flavour of a farewell dinner. But he had dismissed the thought that she could know, or have at least some strange intuition that tomorrow he would be leaving her. Yet had it, in spite of that, in fact been a farewell? Was it she who had been leaving him?

  The chill that he had felt in the bus before arriving at the airport returned. He had thought then that in her misery she might take the cyanide that he had left behind, but this was something entirely new. In the eight years that he had been married to her he had never dreamt that she might be unfaithful to him. He himself had never thought seriously of another woman. But that she was now leaving with another man seemed to be the only explanation of that strange dinner party last night and of what she was doing here today. And the worst of it was that he would never know the truth. From where he had stationed himself he could not see her and he did not dare walk across the lounge and confront her, to see if she was still alone, as she had seemed to be when he arrived, or if a man had joined her. In a few minutes now he would be leaving and he would have to go without finding out if his marriage had been the fine and lovely thing that he had believed it to be, in spite of his own treachery – which he felt had never been to her – but only to something impersonal, of no importance to him, or perhaps from the beginning a mockery.

  The shock of facing this had almost reduced his mind to a blank when he heard the number of his flight being called.

  He got up and walked towards the exit door to which the voice on the loudspeakers had told him to go, being careful as he went not even to glance in her direction, because a pair of eyes directed straight at anyone, even in the most crowded place, can catch that person’s attention. He wanted to hurry, almost to run, but was careful not to walk so fast as to attract notice. He was going through the gate itself when he heard her gasp his name in a tone of horror.

  She clasped his arm. “No!” she said in a desperate whisper. “No, you can’t do this to me!”

  He stood still. Since she had caught up with him there was no longer any need for haste. What he had to do now was pacify her, persuade her to let him go as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. How or why she came to be there no longer mattered.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’ve no choice. It was all in my letter to you.”

  “What letter?” she asked.

  “The one you’ve read, the one I left by my typewriter.”

  “I never found any letter by your typewriter. I haven’t been into your study today.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I told you in my letter.”

  It was his turn to ask in bewilderment, “What letter?”

  “The one I left on the mantelpiece in the sitting room.”

  “I haven’t been into the sitting room today.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  She had let go of his arm, but they were standing still in the long corridor that led towards the gate from which he could reach the plane he must catch while the other passengers who were heading towards it went hurrying past them.

  “I can’t wait here to tell you,” she said. “Go home and read my letter.”

  “I can’t go home,” he said. “I can never go home. Never again in my life. I wish you hadn’t tried to stop me. I couldn’t face what they’d do to me.”

  “I’m not trying to stop you doing anything,” she said, “but I can’t wait here. There isn’t time. Oh God, why did this have to happen? I said goodbye to you last night. I tried to make the evening special. I had my hair done, I cooked a pheasant, I wore that dress you like, all to try to leave you with one good memory of me when you found out the truth. And up to the last minute I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t going to swallow some cyanide I’d got hold of in case of trouble, rather than leave you and face what’s ahead of me now. But then I hadn’t the courage. So let me go – please let me go! I haven’t time to go on talking here.”

  “Cyanide?” he said, bemused. “You were going to take some cyanide?”

  “Yes, it’s all in that letter you haven’t read.”

  “But it was I who was going to take the cyanide.”

  “Why should you do that?”

  “It’s all in the letter you haven’t read.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Neither did he immediately, but his mind was quicker than hers, better adjusted to accepting evidence that might upset the most unquestioned of theories. The shock of what he had just discovered, of how effectively he had been tricked, was the most severe that he had felt that day, but he was able to make himself take her gently by the arm and start urging her along the corridor.

  “I think we’ve both been under certain misapprehensions about one another,” he said, “but no doubt we can sort them out. What name have they put on your passport?”

  “My passport?” She sounded dazed, as if she had not taken in the question.

  “The one they gave you today,” he said.

  “Oh, that one – Mary Smith.”

  “And mine’s John Brown. Not very imaginative, but I suppose people do have names like that. Remember now, you’re Mary and I’m John, at least until we get to wherever they’re taking us. How long have you been working for them?”

  Her face had cleared. She had begun to emerge from her stupor. Her normal look of calm reserve had returned, a reserve which he felt he understood now better than he ever had before. Perhaps she was feeling the same thing about him.

  “Ten years,” she said. “I wanted to stop it when we got married because I thought it might do you damage, but they wouldn’t let me.”

  “Just so,” he said. “It’s a familiar story. Once they’ve got hold of you, they don’t let you go.”

  “I’ve wanted so much – oh, I’ve longed so – to tell you all about it, but I was too ashamed.”

  “Me too.”

  “How long have you been working for them?”

  “Ten years.”

  “And they’ve let us go on all this time without letting either of us know that we were both doing the same job!”

  “It just shows what clever spies we were t
hat we didn’t find one another out.”

  “But wasn’t it horribly cruel?”

  “Yes, I suppose we might have had a lot of cosy chats if we’d known the truth about one another which I expect would have been very enjoyable. But I dare say we were recruited by different branches of the service. It’s possible their right hand didn’t know what their left hand was doing. One tends to think of them as infallible, but they probably make as many mistakes as our own chaps do. Why did you do it?”

  “For the money, of course. I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first, but you get used to it.”

  “So all the pleasant things we’ve had, the fillet steaks and the salmon and the new bedroom furniture and that trip to Madeira, have mostly been paid for by you?”

  “Of course. You don’t think we could have managed it on what you gave me. I was afraid you might get suspicious, but you never had much of a head for money.”

  “And I thought it was I who was paying for those things and it was wonderful how far you made the money stretch.” To his own surprise he was piqued at having been so deluded. “When did they warn you?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Me too. I expect there’s a big operation on, clearing up the Institute – and they’re clearing a lot of us out in a hurry. Perhaps we’ll find the whole flight’s been booked up with spies?”

  The corridor ahead of them seemed endless, but at last they reached the gate through which they were to take off together into safety. They passed through the barrier where they were given their seat reservations and were lucky enough to obtain them side by side, though as Mary Smith and John Brown they could not claim to be connected with one another. The plane left punctually. As it lifted from the ground they clasped each other’s hands tightly, though neither of them was normally afflicted by flying nerves, but perhaps it was because both of them felt that there was nothing else for them to hold on to. Almost at once the plane penetrated a deep layer of cloud and the familiar ground beneath them disappeared.