To Run a Little Faster

by John Gardner

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have had orders from on high.’

  ‘The owner?’

  ‘Not from him. Through him. Not in the country’s interest.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Not just that story, but another one we were going to run — an article Evans had done on Nazi influence in France and the Low Countries. We’ve been asked to kill it and not pursue the Hensman business.’

  ‘You’re going to let them do that?’

  ‘I haven’t much option.’

  ‘What price the freedom of the Press now?’

  ‘It’s been put to me that it is not in the country’s best interests. What would you do?’

  He was angry and off-balance, and I could see and hear how he really felt. It was not just the words, but rather the timbre and texture of his delivery which suggested our civilization going up in flames around us: as though Evans’s article on Nazi influence, and our continued pursuance of the Hensman affair might take the brake off some obscene juggernaut, waiting uphill off the Shetland Islands, ready to scream down through the country belching flame and flailing great arms.

  ‘Where’s Mrs. Hensman staying?’

  ‘With her father, but she’s of no further interest to us.’

  ‘So when are you sending me into the firing line?’

  ‘There isn’t a firing line yet.’

  ‘You didn’t send me to watch the rape of Austria; will it be my turn when they slit the throat of Czechoslovakia?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So when do I go?’

  ‘Next week. A month. The autumn. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll send you to Berlin. Just stay away from the Hensman business. Hang around, Simon.’

  I went back to my cubbyhole and looked up Richard Hood’s address. He lived north of Eaton Place; I presumed in one of those solemn aristocratic mansions which the rich still managed to keep going.

  Making a note of the address and telephone number, I turned my attention to Jane Patterson. She had not been mentioned, by Press or anyone else. Did they think she was still in Bradford seeing her old dad? Or did they know she’d been at the apartment on the Dufourstrasse? Somebody knew. The two men on the boat train dwindling to one on the Paris-Basle express, for instance. There was a vivid picture in my mind of the one seen from the apartment window walking to and fro in the rain. I hadn’t seen him when I’d gone in, but that didn’t mean he had not seen me.

  Jane Patterson had left with Oscar Miller. Where was she now? I started to dig out her London address from the crime desk. She shared a flat with another House of Commons secretary near Chandos Place. Going back to my little glass cubicle, I asked the operator to get me her number. A man answered; a cool, suave voice: the voice of a co-respondent.

  ‘Jane in?’ Making it as offhand as tossing away a dog end.

  ‘Who do you want?’

  ‘Jane Patterson.’

  ‘Who wants her?’

  ‘Just a friend. Is she there?’

  ‘I’ll go and see.’ There was a long wait and no sound from the other end of the line.

  At last his voice was back. ‘You still there? Good. Can you hang on, we’re trying to find her.’

  It couldn’t be a large flat. She was either there or not. After another minute I was about to hang up. Then a girl’s voice.

  ‘Hallo, who is it?’

  I have a reasonably accurate ear for voices. This wasn’t Jane Patterson.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Yes. Who is it?’

  I hung up, grabbed my hat and coat, and headed for Marylebone and the lock-up behind Weymouth Street where I kept my car. It was time to cruise past Miss Patterson’s place and see what was going on. Then perhaps I could tour Belgravia and have a look at the Hood residence. At least I should be able to see if either area was being watched.

  The tourer started like a bird and I joined the traffic in the High Street. It was not until I got up to Oxford Street, behind Selfridges, that I noticed the rakish Alvis behind. It was still there when I negotiated Oxford Circus, and again as I reached Piccadilly. There seemed to be two men in the car. I put a bit of a spurt on and did a spot of weaving through the buses and taxis, heading towards Westminster. The Alvis stuck like a leech. It was not the kind of motor the police would use — far too flashy.

  I thought of Miller, dead on the train, and Puxley chopped to pieces by a local goods. Then of Poppy at the hotel. Perhaps Guy was right. Maybe it was safer all round to forget about the Hensman business — in the country’s interests and mine. Reluctantly I turned away from Westminster and pointed the car back towards the Strand.

  Poppy was still reading The Nine Tailors, irritable and bored at being alone all day. I took her down to the car and we went over to Marylebone to see if George had made any impression on the flat. The Alvis stayed with us all the way.

  There was a new lock on the door, and most of the broken bits and pieces had been cleared away, but it was still a bit like a room hit by bomb blast. I remembered a village near Teruel, when I was in Spain; a small house with one wall ripped off so that it looked like a stage setting; the little room on the ground floor savaged by an explosive wind. What was it going to be like here in London if the warnings remained unheeded and we allowed Hitler to push his frontiers forward? Eventually the bombs had to fall and the hounds of hell would be unleashed on Marylebone, Westminster, Belgravia. The Spanish room, the Mayfair penthouse or my little flat could be one and the same place. War was no respecter of appeasement, or even neutrality. In that village, remembered so clearly, a shell had blasted into one of the correspondents’ cars. It had killed two Americans and the Reuter’s man. The Times correspondent — I think his name was Philby — had been slightly injured, but that was after I had left Spain.

  Poppy looked at me as though she had been asking unheard questions.

  ‘Better get the place redone,’ I smiled. ‘That is if you want to live here.’

  ‘I don’t mind where we live.’ She caught my hand.

  ‘I’ll tell George that you’re in charge. Give you carte blanche. Do it up for me, Poppy — for both of us. Get it how you’ll like it.’

  She looked very happy. ‘I’ll start tomorrow, after I’ve been down to the publishers.’ She told me how she had given them a ring that afternoon and they wanted to talk with her about another book. They were expecting great things of her department store book. ‘Can we afford it?’ She asked as though not really expecting an answer. ‘Well, I can contribute from my writing.’

  The time had come, I knew in my bones, for us to begin serious talks about dates and wedding arrangements. I didn’t like to tell her that Guy was thinking in terms of my going away again. It struck me that whatever happened I could well be back in my role as war correspondent before the year was out. We walked around among the bits and pieces, with Poppy making suggestions: a wallpaper she had seen somewhere, the kind of bookcase that would go well in one corner. Did I know any reasonable man to do the actual work? I said that George would find someone.

  ‘The rozzer said you’d picked out those two blokes,’ George said when we buttonholed him downstairs. He stood behind the little counter in the foyer near the letter boxes, looking pleased with himself. ‘I picked the same ones. Wasn’t much doubt, was there, sir? Miss?’

  On the counter was a leaflet which said that at least a million men and women were needed to volunteer for ARP work. In an emergency, it said, the work would be exciting and dangerous. George saw me looking at it.

  ‘Taking some of the lectures, I am, sir. Anti-gas course starts next week. Got to be ready in case that Hitler gets too big for his boots.’

  I told him that we were going to be married and he looked pleased. Proud even. George regarded his tenants as his own family. Poppy discussed the redecorating problem, and we went out into the early evening air. There was no rain and it seemed warmer. We walked up the High Street into Oxford Street, vaguely window shopping. When we got to Oxford Circus, Poppy said she would like to look in Lib
erty’s window, so down we went, arm in arm, talking about ringing her mother in Paris, how we wanted a small wedding, nothing too grand, whether we could afford to honeymoon in England or abroad. After Liberty’s we decided to walk down to Piccadilly and take a tube up to the Strand. We would have to go back to the Strand Palace and I had to ring the paper again before I could completely relax for the evening. I told her that we had dropped the Hensman story, but she didn’t appear interested. At the bottom of Regent Street we went down to the tube. I got the tickets and we started off for the escalator. Reaching it, I paused to step aside for Poppy; above us the big advertisement for Ovaltine and the starburst clock.

  A stocky, balding man stepped between us as we began to descend, and she looked back, shrugging and giving me the kind of smile mothers give to children who are nervous on railway stations. The moving stairs, up and down, were crowded, the curved tunnels below full of people, pushing and shoving both ways. I glanced behind me and felt a sudden irrational sense of concern. On the steps immediately to my rear were two men; one middle-aged, the other younger. They could have been policemen, or military men in mufti — NCO types, not commissioned officers. Behind them a young couple intent on each other. We were half way down now, and because of my unease I began to move out, intending to start walking and take Poppy with me. As soon as I moved the balding man side-stepped, blocking my way.

  Below, among the crowd, near the foot of the moving stairs, two more men stood, still and waiting. They were both dressed smartly, in conservative black overcoats and bowler hats. They wore gloves, I noticed, and their stance was of men expecting trouble.

  The next moment I felt the hairs on the nape of my neck rise in fear; a cold hand seemed to run up my back. Wind from below gusted up the staircase so that I had to clutch at my trilby, and far away came the rumble of the train. The two men below were the pair who had been on the boat train. The one nearest the bottom of the escalator was the man who had waited so patiently in the Dufourstrasse, across the road from Oscar Miller’s flat.

  Chapter Eight

  Poppy did not suspect anything. As she stepped off the staircase she turned, automatically looking back, about to step to one side and wait for me to catch up. Her face altered from the expectant smile to annoyance, then fear as the stocky balding man grasped her arm, hustling her into the crowd heading away to the right. She tried to struggle, but one of the bowler hats had turned and moved in close. They were half carrying her, I could see, but nobody else noticed anything wrong. The two men who had been behind me were now on either side, arms linking with mine, shoving and jostling me forward to the, left, in the opposite direction to Poppy. The other bowler hat was now behind.

  ‘Don’t cry out, Mr. Darrell. Nobody’s going to get hurt unless you do something stupid.’ He had a commanding voice, not uncultured, no accent.

  ‘What the bloody hell ...?’ I began, then felt the hardness of metal in my side.

  ‘We don’t want to get involved in any more killing.’ It was the younger of the men who was whispering now. A gentle voice, but one of which you would take notice. They half frog-marched me among the crowd, down the tiled tunnel towards the platforms; Around me people behaved in an alarmingly natural manner — it was like a nightmare.

  ‘So I told him, you don’t do that with me, I said,’ giggled a plump little typist.

  ‘And did he?’ shrieked her friend.

  ‘Oh, Jean, how could you?’ They went on arm in arm, their laughter almost childish.

  ‘And I’m putting in this cold frame over the weekend. Gamages’re going to deliver. Should get some nice marrows.’

  ‘Never grown marrows,’ said the skinny time-serving clerk in step with his mackintoshed companion.

  ‘Then perhaps after the flicks we could go to my place.’ Dark-haired, almost a schoolboy.

  ‘To see your etchings?’ The big calf eyes gazed up adoringly. Last year they had both probably been at school: they had the thin veneer of worldly knowledge which comes from inexperience.

  ‘Down here, Darrell.’ The fellow on my right was leaning against me, forcing me down the platform. I still couldn’t believe it was happening.

  ‘Keep your head still.’

  I’d been casting about as though trying to catch the eye of some passing stranger. Poppy was in my head: the look on her face as they had dragged her off. Two youths clattered past, one grabbing at the coat-tails of the other, and we were walking like friends down towards the far end, where the black mouth of the tunnel yawned ready to spew the electric train into the station. A woman alone, standing in front of an advertisement for Wrigley’s Chewing Gum. Three schoolboys with a pencil, drawing on a poster for Aspro.

  ‘Lay off that, sonny, or I’ll have the police on you,’ said bowler hat as we passed. The boys gasped and one murmured some cheek. ‘Terrible, kids’ manners today,’ said my captor as though we were on an evening jaunt.

  A pair of young marrieds talked close together, agitated, as though having words and trying to keep up appearances. Down the tunnel came the wind, and the noise of the approaching train.

  It came in with a rattle and whine, the carriages blazing with light, like a fairground ride. The hiss as the doors went back, and the push of people coming off and going on.

  ‘Let them off first please,’ shouted a guard. Then, ‘Mind the doors. Mind the doors.’ The hiss, a smell of smoke in the nostrils, and the damp. The motor turning over, dud-dud-dud-duding, rising to the expulsion of air from the brakes. The train moved off again. It was obviously the moment they had been waiting for, the platform emptying of people, not yet filling again for the next train. The men on either side pulled me towards the sloping wall and leaned against it, while the smart-looking one in the bowler stood an inch or two in front of me.

  ‘You see how easy it is,’ he said. His face, close to, was hard, with leathery skin: a man who had spent a lot of time in the sun and wind. A sailor perhaps? He had blue eyes, light and clear, above which his eyebrows arched naturally upwards giving the impression that he was permanently questioning the world around him.

  ‘What the hell’s this ... What have you done with …’

  ‘Just remain silent.’ He smiled, for the benefit of any passengers who came near, like the couple keeping up a front while having words. ‘Remain silent and listen. Miss Cooke is as unhurt as yourself. This is simply a lesson — or if you want it stronger, a warning. We can pick you up, either of you, at any time we please. And anywhere. If we have any further cause, then we will pick you up again: only next time we will also drop you. Probably down some disused well where you will not be found this side of the year two thousand. You understand?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t know? Well, maybe I’ll give you the benefit. You will cease to interest yourself in any matter connected with Mr. Michael Hensman or his wife — and you will cease forthwith.’ It had a military air to it: the wording of King’s Regulations. ‘You understand?’ He could well have been a man in authority. A policeman even. I thought of Fox’s strange comment about the Met having some strange bedfellows, and wondered.

  ‘I take orders from my editor.’

  ‘Well, see that you follow them.’

  ‘You think I can be intimidated?’

  He gave a hollow little chuckle. ‘I sincerely hope so. It usually works. If not ...’ He lifted a gloved hand, the fist tight. When it, reached eye-level he paused and opened the fingers. ‘Be a good chap and do as you’re told. You wouldn’t want Miss Cooke hurt, would you? No. And if I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t go running to the police: not worth the candle, old man. Just not worth the candle. I’m sure you have the idea.’

  They were tactics which would possibly work with some people. With me they simply produced a wild, almost uncontrollable desire to lash out. I bit on some imaginary bullet and stayed silent. The day would come, I was even more determined than ever.

  ‘Good man,’ he smiled. ‘You’d have to get up pretty early in t
he morning to catch up with us.’

  The younger one at my elbow gave a little chuckle. ‘And run a bloody sight faster,’ he said.

  The platform was filling up and in the distance a hollow rumble signalled the approach of another train.

  ‘You’ll get on this one without any fuss.’ He was quite obviously used to being obeyed. ‘And then go back to your hotel. Miss Cooke will be waiting for you.’

  There was a jab of metal in my side again. The better part of valour was certainly discretion. As the train pulled out, the bowler-hatted merchant had the gall to wave. It even looked friendly. The last thing I saw on the platform was a poster for The Lost Horizon, starring Ronald Colman.

  Poppy was frantic but hadn’t rung the police. ‘They told me not to involve anyone else and it would be all right,’ she trembled, on the verge of tears. ‘They told me to make sure you did as you were told. Please, Sim, who are they? Why?’

  ‘They’re thugs, and it doesn’t take much intelligence to be a thug.’ I also trembled, but not with fear. The rage burned bright as a beacon in my head and stomach. ‘Keep away from the Hensman business; don’t go to the police. A warning, my dear. It was meant to frighten us silly.’

  ‘Well, it succeeded. As far as I’m concerned, it did the trick. They told me to plead with you if necessary. I’m pleading, Sim. Whatever they want — do it.’

  I thought of Guy, angry in his office, furious at the thought of his country buckling under to the spurious claims of the Nazi dictator; indignant because some higher authority had ordered us to drop the Hensman story. I wondered if he had also been given the treatment by the bronzed and bowler-hatted bully.

  ‘You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch up with us,’ he had said. Well, he had proved his point by cutting us apart in public. ‘And run a bloody sight faster.’ I heard the chuckle from the blackguard’s henchman. If they thought intimidation would stop me they were quite wrong. I would just have to run a little faster than them, get up a shade earlier, and move with more stealth.