by John Gardner
‘Stay quite still,’ whispered my captor, reinforcing his words in the now familiar fashion.
A shadow appeared at the door on his side and a second later it was open, bringing cool air into the vehicle, which made me shiver slightly. I was told to move over and get out; disinclined to argue I followed the dark shape into the street. The driver climbed out of the front and I now faced the three of them, my back to the taxi. The newly-arrived figure spoke briefly and rapidly to my companion while the driver took up a position to my left.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said, his voice tired. It was almost a sigh of relief.
‘Good,’ the smart one in the homburg nodded. ‘We should never have let him come up. And the girl?’
‘They’ve taken her with them.’
This was the moment for me to join in. ‘Are you talking about Poppy — Miss Cooke?’
My travelling companion turned towards me. ‘She has gone on ahead to await your arrival. You’ll see her in the morning.’ Then, as though this settled everything, he addressed the other two. ‘Inside,’ he ordered, still with no sign of emotion.
My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I could make out that the cul-de-sac in which we stood was bordered solely by high brick walls. Something glinted along the coping: broken glass, like weird, dangerous plants. To the right, large wooden gates were set into the wall, one of them swung back enough to allow the passage of perhaps one person at a time. They took me through into a dark yard, rough and uneven under foot. As we crossed it — the driver with one hand on my arm as though he was guiding a blind man — I tried to strain my ears for any sound which might help to identify the place at a later time. To the right, over a black cluster of what I took to be buildings, a red glow reflected against the night sky: the lights of the huge sprawling hive that was London. Near at hand I could hear the sound of a train, and against the glow I fancied that I could detect drifting smoke.
Within a minute we were by another, smaller, door which led into a dimly-lit passage and, eventually, to a room, bare and uninviting with peeling grey walls. A single light bulb swung from the ceiling and there were two windows covered with heavy tarpaulins nailed hastily to the frames so that no light would be visible from the outside. There were two small iron bedsteads covered with grey blankets, grubby pillows at the head of each; a bare wooden table and some four or five cheap wooden chairs. On the table lay three plates, recently used, smudged with reddish-brown thick liquid which I took to be the remains of baked beans (two large tins lay empty in the corner by a small gas stove on which stood a blackened and unsavoury-looking pan). There were also some cups and glasses, most of which had been drunk from in the not too distant past.
‘You live like pigs,’ said the soft voiced man, tipping his hat back on his head. ‘Like pigs,’ he repeated, the lips moving in disgust. ‘What did he think of this hovel?’
‘Didn’t like it,’ replied the one who had materialized by the taxi.
‘Not like the House of Commons dining-room, is it?’ chuckled the driver.
‘It’s not funny. You are regarded as soldiers. No soldier I know would live in squalor like this.’ He turned to me and I could see that the lack of feeling in his voice was reflected in the eyes. They were as icy as glass chips, a doll’s eyes. ‘I apologize for this, Darrell. We’ll be away as soon as possible.’
His mention of soldiers had brought something else home to me. The man acted with the precision of a well-drilled army man. An officer.
‘You have eaten?’ he asked.
‘Earlier. Where’s Miss Cooke?’
‘All in good time. We shall be visiting her soon. You would care for a drink? We have whisky, I believe, though I doubt if these vermin have provided soda.’
The thought of the remedial powers of a whisky, however small, came as balm. I said that if I could not see Poppy straight away, a whisky would be the next best thing. I needed to relax, to get to terms with these people as soon as possible; if necessary, to gain their confidence. The driver disappeared, coming back a few moments later with a pair of moderately clean glasses, each with a liberal portion of amber liquid. While he was away, I asked why I was in the present predicament.
‘Because we had to take the rather drastic action in your flat, Mr. Darrell. Or at least one of our people had to take that action. There is also someone who wishes to ask you a few pertinent questions regarding, a notebook and some names. You know what I mean?’
‘I think so, but I haven’t got the relevant pages. You must know that.’
‘It’s what we’ve been told. However ...’ he began, but at this point the driver returned with the glasses. He also brought a small jug of water. As he proffered the drinks he said, ‘Everything’s ready. We can go as soon as you like.’
The spirit burned my throat and I could feel it going down like live coals. I took another sip before realizing that something was wrong. I am not a heavy drinker, but a couple of sips of whisky should not be doing this to my legs. The faces around me became distorted and I was aware of the glass sliding from my fingers. It seemed to hit the floor with a huge bang, magnified and echoing in my head. Through the dreadful sense of nausea and loss of equilibrium I heard someone say, ‘He’s going. Catch him.’
There was a whirlpool and the fumes of the wretched drink felt as though they were choking me. Then the room and the faces fell away.
I couldn’t move my legs and there was a smell of fish in the darkness. The groaning noise got louder before I realized it was coming from my throat.
‘Lie still,’ said a voice close by. The one who had met us when the taxi came to a halt. He had to shout above the noise and bumping, and I didn’t have the strength not to do as I was told. So I lay there, being bumped around, waiting for the fog to clear. At first I was conscious only of the noise and movement, then of the physical sensations: the bone dryness of my throat, the ache where some kind of restraint had been put on my limbs, the comparative darkness, the muzziness in my head, and a bruised sore patch on my right bicep. Lying in the darkness I began to rationalize the situation. I was pinioned in the back of some vehicle, travelling at speed over a flat surface. There was no doubt as to the other sensations. The drink had been laced with something which brought on nausea and light-headedness. This had been reinforced with an injection, hence the bruised feeling.
It was impossible to tell how long I had been out. It could have been hours or a few minutes. However, I was perfectly sound but for the dryness. The light-headed sleepiness, I argued, would pass. In some ways I felt more able to think, even in this uncomfortable situation. I questioned that conclusion, remembering that some dangerous drugs bring with them a feeling of euphoria. But there was a need to exercise the mind.
It had to have something to do with the Hensman business, there was little doubt about that; and mainly to do with the notebook and the names of Ramsey, Nettlefold and Trim. The soft-voiced charmer with the Anthony Eden hat had said they had picked me up because of what had happened in the flat. Reluctantly I forced myself to think about Jane Patterson lying on the bed. Why had she gone there in the first place? Because I had been with her and Miller in Basle? Because I had given Miller my address and telephone number? Fox had said something. When? I searched around the ragbag of facts, images, words, conversations. We had been at Scotland Yard looking at their books of photographs, after the flat had been done over.
‘A bit odd about Oscar Miller, Darrell.’ Fox’s voice came back clearly. ‘When they found him, his pockets had been cleaned out. No money, not a sou. Even his comb gone. Odd, don’t you think?’
At least I knew that he was carrying the paper with my address and telephone number. If Jane Patterson had been first to the body and cleaned out the pockets? If she had even been the killer, on the run, trying to get back to England to make contact. Hensman was dead and, as far as I was concerned, Mrs. Beryl Hensman was a prime suspect — a link between the three civil servants and the strange sums of money. The Patters
on girl would hardly have wanted to go straight to her. If she had sought refuge in my flat? There the thoughts petered out: the whole thing becoming a complicated jigsaw in which nothing really fitted.
Back came the image of the girl, legs splayed on the bed. Why was she only in her underwear? The clothes she had been wearing didn’t seem to have been removed by force. Haste, possibly? Had she been routing around in the wardrobe for a change of clothes? Poppy had already moved some of her things in, I knew that. But she would hardly have answered the door dressed only in the flimsy garment. Whoever had shot her — if it was a shot — had her confidence. Logic, Darrell, use logic. She might undress in front of another woman, it was possible. She would undress in front of her lover. But her lover was dead, drowned. I thought of the military-style overcoat on the floor. That could have been the answer: the coat slung round her as she went to the door, caught in the act of changing into one of Poppy’s dresses. That didn’t really work either. Jane Patterson was of reasonable height. Poppy was minute compared to her. So it could only be another woman, or a lover. I wasn’t to know if Hensman was the only one. For all I knew, Jane Patterson was as promiscuous as a rattlesnake.
Another woman? Poppy came into my head. Impossible. Beryl Hensman? She was in the South of France. Against my will I was drifting away again into sleep with the impossible algebra spinning circles around my head, like cartoon stars around Mickey Mouse or Goofy when they were hit.
Hensman, Trim, Ramsey, Nettlefold. Oscar Miller. The notebook. The regular sums of money paid since 1936. Why should it all come together, aimed in my direction now, at this point? Jane Patterson’s body in my flat — our flat. I was awake again with the thought of how Fox would do the sums. A girl dead. Simon Darrell and Poppy Cooke, his fiancée, disappeared. There would be headlines from that, and warrants. I suddenly went very cold because I knew now, with a great deal of clarity, that whatever the answers, whatever the reasons, wherever they were taking me in this van which stank of fish, they were not going to bring me back. Or if they were, it would be to face a murder charge.
Dr. Johnson was perfectly right: when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
At that moment we seemed to be slowing down and I was shifted a little to the left. We bumped a shade and it seemed that we were moving uphill. We stopped and I heard doors slamming. A voice saying we had made good time. The rear doors of the van were opened, grey half-light revealed in the opening.
‘Is he awake?’ said the one in the homburg.
My guard told him that I was.
‘We’re here, Darrell. If you give us your word that you will not struggle, I’ll have your arms and legs unstrapped.’ I croaked my affirmation, looking out of the rear doors, beyond the barrel-like driver and the leader. By the feel of the air it was dawn, not dusk. I could make out a familiar line of trees and the rough pebbledash side of a ,building. I thought I knew now where we were. My guard leaned over me and undid the straps while I started to move my cramped arms and legs, slowly at first for they were stiff and numb, pins and needles taking the place of numbness as the circulation began to flow.
‘Come on then, Darrell, we haven’t got all day.’
Gently I started to move down the van. Far away, from the house, came the sound of a telephone ringing. They helped me out, steadying me as my feet hit the gravel. I had been right. From what I could make out we were behind the house. Previously I had only seen it from the front; from the road, and briefly from the drive, on the day I had driven Jane Patterson there. We were at the Hensmans’ place just outside Boscastle.
The van was pulled well behind the building so that nobody could view it from the road. There was also another car: a smart black coupe, facing down the drive. The rear door of the house was open and a figure stood silhouetted against the light. Slowly they helped me towards the door, and the figure stepped back. Once more I expected to see the leathery-faced man in the bowler hat, but I had never, to my knowledge, seen this one before. He was elderly, dressed in an old tweed jacket and grey flannels, his face cracked and lined as if someone had doodled on plasticine with a nail file; his grey wispy hair blowing in the light dawn breeze. It was his voice I had heard saying they had made good time.
‘So this is young Darrell,’ he said now. ‘Your lady will be very pleased to see you. She’s made a bit of a nuisance of herself during the night. Kept the wife on the hop, and Quorn.’ He nodded to my original captor. ‘How’s the night treated you, Peter?’
At least I could put a name to him now.
‘He’s been quiet as a lamb,’ said Peter, removing his homburg as we passed into the kitchen. ‘No real problems, are there?’
‘None.’
There was a smell of bacon recently fried, and coffee. We were led through to the room which in the Hensmans’ day had presumably been the drawing room: comfortable modern furniture, a large mirror over the mantelpiece, a watercolour of some church on one wall, heavy velvet curtains, an open mahogany bureau in one corner, and a small electric fire switched on to warm the room in the chill of dawn. A woman, possibly a little younger than the man who had admitted us to the house, stood beside the fire. She was dressed in heavy tweeds, and for some reason I noticed that she wore a pair of mannish brogues. As we entered she was just replacing the earpiece of the telephone on its hook.
‘They’ve found the girl,’ she said. ‘Is that Darrell?’
Peter told her it was. ‘You talked to somebody else, didn’t you?’ She spoke in a clipped and precise manner, aggressive. I thought that she’d probably played hockey at school and bullied the younger kids a lot.
‘Where’s Poppy?’ I asked.
‘Who did you speak to, Simon?’ Peter was under control, but for the first time, anger was audible in his voice.
‘To Poppy’s mother. You didn’t think I was going to walk straight into your arms without making sure you had her?’
‘Nobody else?’ He moved towards me, a threatening gesture.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t think he got to anyone else.’
‘Depends if the Baker Street lot spotted him getting into the taxi. I don’t think they did, but they’ve not been off his back the last few weeks.’
‘Where’s Poppy?’ I asked again.
‘She’s resting,’ said the elderly man who had come in behind us. ‘You’ll see her in due course.’
‘We’re in the Hensmans’ house, aren’t we?’
Peter smiled, ‘You are observant. But then we should expect that from a journalist.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘That’s why we’ve all been so worried about you over these last weeks, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ said the elderly man, sitting down in one of the easy chairs. ‘Yes, it’s a nice little place. Do us very well, I should think. We’ve rented it from Mrs. Hensman. There’s a possibility we’ll buy. I think we could well settle here.’
Peter and one of the other men laughed. ‘A nice quiet place to be until the rest of us arrive and you are appointed officially to this area.’
The elderly one grunted. He had taken out a briar pipe and was proceeding to fill it from a jar near his chair. ‘I think we will buy. We’re in constant communication with the owners.’
‘And I think we’ll probably sell to you, Christian.’ The new voice came from the door and I turned, presuming this was the other name to which they had referred, Quorn.
‘So this is Simon Darrell who has been such a thorn in our flesh, such a worry to everyone. I like your flat, Darrell. Your lady has good taste.’
At first I didn’t take it in, and must have shown it by the look on my face as I peered forward. He came closer and there was now no doubt that this was the face I had looked at so often in the past weeks, staring at me from photographs on the front of newspapers and in my office drawer.
‘We haven’t met,’ he said. ‘My name’s Hensman. Michael Hensman.’
Chapter Ten
It was the
seal, the certainty, on my most grim conclusion. Hensman, standing in the doorway of this neat and typically English country drawing-room, was the living proof that I had no future. As the drowning man is supposed to see the film of his life played out on the retina of his mind, so I had this strange and clear vision.
The country house and father smelling of antiseptic; a stethoscope on the hall table; mother in a long dress kissing me good night in a warm nursery; the shouts of play in the quadrangle; old Breck, the housemaster, ponderous in his summing up of my term’s work. Darrell might just become a writer of sensational fiction; the cloakroom smut and my first girl, fumbling in the dark on the side of a hill; the kettle on the small stove and the trays of cups to be taken in to the journalists; Keep the Home Fires Burning; Uncle Bob was killed at Arras; the dole queues like brown snakes; the grubby hand reaching out; small whisky and beer; Sarah with a cigarette holder; the Street; Guy giving me the job on the paper; the church hushed; Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring; Sarah by an open window at night, her nightdress curving against her thighs and the shape of her body seen through the silk; the telephone ringing; trains and boats; bombs, machine-gun bullets hitting the dry wall; the corpses; a child’s body shattered by the sunny step of a door; blood like dried paint or rust; glaring white walls and the sound of aircraft; a thousand headlines — by Simon Darrell; the door opening and Tommy Carter, suddenly awake, turning in my bed with my wife beside him; the creaking lawyers; alone in Marylebone High Street; the pad and pencil; corrected copy; Poppy in the street, lifting her face; Jane Patterson; Miller; Poppy’s face on a pillow, eyes closed and mouth open, noisy at her peak; the ruptured flat and the menace of the man with the bowler hat; Hensman’s face; Ramsey, Trim and Nettlefold; Topher Poole like a ventriloquist’s dummy filtering the words from the corner of his mouth; Jane Patterson on the bed; Peter, the man in the homburg; why?