The White Room

by L. P. Davies

  “Very interesting,” Axel said awkwardly, stiffly.

  She became pink. “I told you all that because I think there’s more to you than meets the eye. I don’t want you to think the same about me.”

  He regarded her in silence.

  “Oh, dear—” Her dismay was certainly unfeigned. “Now I’ve made you angry. If I’m talking out of turn, slap me down hard, tell me to mind my own business. I won’t mind. Uncle Vince often does. He says slapping down is good for the soul. He calls me a busybody do-gooder. That’s because everyone on the island brings their troubles to me. You get to know when someone is in trouble.

  “Last night when you—” She hesitated. “When I said it was because of overwork, that was for Mary and Bert’s benefit. It was something more than that that made you collapse the way you did.”

  “And that’s why you think there’s more to me than meets the eye?”

  “That’s one of the reasons. This pub is the very last place a man of your type would want to stay. All you had when you came was a brief case, no luggage. You just grabbed the first thing that came to hand and then ran. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. You’re running from something or someone. But not from the police—I feel sure about that. You’re not using your real name and you’ve tried to alter your appearance by tinting your hair. Put all those together, add the look in your eyes—” She broke off. “This is where you tell me to mind my own business.”

  Axel looked down at his plate. He had been on the point of doing just that, even if not in so many words. But then had come second thoughts. Pie had to have help of some kind, of any kind. His mind, his power of reasoning, was in no better shape than it had been yesterday. He needed someone trustworthy who could do some of his thinking for him. This girl, a stranger both to himself and the country, was a straw to be clutched at. How useful that straw would turn out to be was something he would have to find out. At least she seemed—sensible. He looked up, wavering, still undecided.

  Louise said: “I’ve spent most of my life working with a doctor. If it’s done nothing else, it’s taught me to respect confidences. There are women who can keep a secret, Axel.” She paused. “That is your real name?”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly. “I changed it because there’s a faint chance my real name might be recognised. I am running away—at least you could call it that. But not because I have done anything wrong.” His features relaxed into a faint smile. “The boot’s completely on the other foot. I changed my name but not my appearance. Even if I’d thought about a disguise, there wasn’t time.”

  “You’ve used dye on your hair unless I’m very much mistaken.” She leaned across the table, peering intently. “I wasn’t mistaken.”

  “You were.” He smiled again. “No attempt at disguise, Louise. And I’m not vain enough to want to cover grey hairs in the hope of making myself look younger than my years.”

  “Not that,” she said. “The other way round. Not grey hair darkened—dark hair tinted grey at the temples to make you look older.” She grinned wickedly. “Or more distinguished.”

  “No—” Axel started almost angrily, and then was silent, remembering the stains on the towel. He pushed his plate away.

  “Have you finished?” The girl came to her feet, smoothing down her black skirt. “If you do feel like unburdening yourself, there’s a garden out at the back. I usually go and sit there for a while after breakfast.”

  He followed her through the house. There was a seat, a slatted, green-painted affair with a curved back. It had been placed on the edge of a lawn facing a break in the trees that afforded a vista of spreading fields.

  Louise took her cigarette case from the handbag that seemed to accompany her everywhere. “Have you decided yet whether or not you smoke, Axel?” Her eyes twinkled.

  He took one. “I think I do.” He waited for the flame of her lighter.

  “You only think.” Exhaling smoke she leaned back, crossing slim brown legs. “You don’t know?”

  “You say you work in a hospital. Do you have much to do with drugs?”

  She watched his face. “I do all the dispensing. I’m not a pharmacist, but I know something about medicines.”

  “Do you know of any drug that can dull the mind, that can make every thing seem unreal?”

  “Hypnotics. Yes.” She waved smoke aside.

  “How long do the effects last?”

  “That depends upon the drug used and how it was used. A small dosage of a mild hypnotic, only a few hours. But a strong one, used by a psychiatrist over a period of time along with other forms of treatment—”

  “What forms of treatment?” he broke in.

  “Generally, hypnosis.”

  Hypnosis. That was something he hadn’t thought about. They had drugged him. Then, under hypnosis, they had implanted that command in his mind. You are going to kill—

  “Could someone be hypnotised without his knowing?” Axel asked. “While he is in a drugged sleep?”

  Louise stared at him, her cigarette halted on its way to her lips.

  “Is that a hypothetical question, Axel?”

  “Yesterday—” He remembered and corrected himself. “No, two days ago, I was drugged and fell asleep. I thought I was alone in the house—”

  “But you think someone may have used hypnosis on you without your knowing?” The cigarette completed its journey.

  “Is it possible?”

  “I don’t think it is, Axel. But I can’t say for sure. I’m out of my depth now. You’d have to talk to Uncle Vince about that.” She shook her head. “And I doubt whether he could give you a proper answer. You’d need a specialist for that, a psychiatrist who has made a study of hypnosis.” She leaned forward. “Where is all this leading?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked across the fields. Church bells chimed distantly. “All I do know is that something has been done to my mind. I can’t think clearly. I’m living in a kind of dream where nothing seems real. I think I know who is responsible. I think I know why. But thinking and knowing are two very different things.”

  Axel dropped his part-smoked cigarette to the grass and set his heel on it, grinding it slowly into the turf.

  “My real name is Axel Champlee. The name wouldn’t mean anything to you even if you had always lived in this country. I’ve always kept out of the limelight. The power behind the throne. I control one of the largest groups of manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. ISI. International Sales Industries. Another name that won’t mean anything to you unless you read the financial columns. You will have come across some of the products I control. Dimura Cosmetics, Bardon Fabrics, Wellbeing Furniture, Dewley Cars.”

  “Don’t forget I’m a stranger to civilization,” the girl said in a small voice. She took a long, deep breath. “You mean you own all those?”

  “I did,” he told his feet. “Until a few days ago. Those and quite a few more besides. Now—” He shrugged.

  “You’re not trying to make fun of me? You wouldn’t be taking a rise out of me for being inquisitive?”

  lie looked up, puzzled by the question. “Taking a rise out of you?”

  She searched his face. “No, you mean it. You really arc what you say. I’ve read about such people … I never thought I’d ever come across one face to face. And yet I knew all the time there was something different about you.”

  “I’m a businessman,” Axel said. “No more, no less. Most of what I control came to me when my father died. I’ve added to it as all the Champlees have added to their inheritances down through the years.”

  “And yet I’ve never heard of you,” she marvelled.

  “Very few people outside the world of finance have. Publicity docs more harm than good. My name doesn’t appear on a single list of directors. I don’t even possess an office as such. All my business is conducted from my home. I live in Grenfelle. Barkley House.”

  “Grenfelle—” Louise shook her head. “No, I haven’t heard the name before. Is it far fro
m here, Axel?”

  He turned, resting one arm along the hack of the seat while he searched and located the direction. “Not far from here.” He pointed. “Over that way. About ten miles away.”

  “Most of my exploring has been in the opposite direction.

  Wymondham and points south. I’ve only been in your direction once. What was the name of the place?” She furrowed her brow. “Bridford. That’s what?—about six miles from here. Grenfelle must lie beyond.”

  “It’s only a very small place. Oddly, I know very little about it, even though I was born there.” Axel gazed along the misty tunnel of the past. The details were blurred, nebulous. Everything that had taken place before the day when he had stepped into his father’s shoes was unimportant, had no bearing on the present. “I was turfed off to my first school when I was only six. All my vacations were spent at Richmond. The family used to have a house there. I didn’t see Barkley House again until I was in my twenties. And all I’ve seen of Grenfelle since then has been through the windows of my cars.

  “I married Romaine—” He had to think. “Twelve years ago. Just about the same time that Carla, my sister, married Kendall Ibbetson.”

  Carla. Kendall. What are you going to do? I am going to kill—

  “What’s she like, your wife?” Louise asked.

  “Romaine?” For a moment her face refused to take shape. “Open up any glossy magazine at the society pages and you’ll find a dozen or more Romaines. All cast from the same mould. Glossier than the pages. Sleek, golden, hard. It was Carla who first introduced us. I thought I was in love. It all seems a very long time ago now.”

  “You sound bitter,” Louise told her cigarette.

  “On Friday afternoon,” Axel recited tonelessly, “Carla came to tell me that she had discovered that her husband, Kendall, had set out to ruin me by buying controlling interests in all my companies. He is able to do this because he has been supplied with the necessary information by my wife, who has been having an affair with him.”

  The bells had finished ringing. The morning was quiet.

  “Axel—” the girl breathed. “What can I say?”

  A dog barked far away. Smoke rose in a thin wavering trail from an invisible chimney.

  “But why?” Louise asked after a while. “Why you—here, now?”

  Axel told her why. He took her with him to the moment when Carla had produced the list from her handbag. “I have it—” It was still in his pocket, a crumpled mass. He gave it to Louise just as it was, leaving her to smooth it out and read it —even though it would mean nothing to her—and then look up at him, waiting for him to continue. He told her everything that had happened, every trivial thing, leaving out nothing.

  And when he had finished:

  “Your sister drugged you?” She couldn’t believe that. “Your own sister?”

  “Either Carla herself or else Gregson or the maid. It makes no difference who. They are all in it together. They all left at the same time.”

  “Can you be positive?”

  “I went in every room. I was alone in the house.”

  “No—that the whiskey had been doped?”

  “I was all right before I had that glass.”

  “But why, Axel? Do you know why?”

  “I know why.” He nodded, his gaze on the distant green. “The name is more important than the people who bear it. No matter what the cost, the fortunes and honour of the Champlee name must be preserved. That is Carla’s creed. Her own husband has set out to destroy the Champlee name. He must be stopped. And the only way in which he can be stopped now—’’

  “The gun!” Louise broke in, aghast.

  “Cleaned and loaded and set ready to hand. And a message planted in the potential murderer’s mind—‘I am going to kill—’ And the potential killer drugged so that he doesn’t know whether he is dreaming or awake, so that he can barely tell the difference between reality and unreality. So that afterwards, when the thing has been done, there will not be a man to put on trial for murder, but a lunatic to be consigned without trial to an asylum. Better to smirch the name of Champ-lee with insanity than foul it with murder. There is, after all, a kind of dignity attached to the label of insanity.”

  “I can’t believe it,” the girl whispered, face filled with horror. “It can’t be like that. People, real people, don’t plot and scheme like that. They would have to be mad themselves to think up something like that. A woman, setting out to make her own brother believe himself insane, then persuading him to commit murder—”

  “You don’t know Carla.”

  “I don’t want to.” She shuddered. “Even though I can’t believe she would try to do a thing like that, I still wouldn’t like to meet her. So you ran away because you were afraid of what you might do?”

  “And because I had to find somewhere to hide until the effect of the drug had worn off.”

  “And has it, Axel?”

  “A little.” He pressed the fingers of both hands to his forehead. “I’m still far from being normal. I can think, try to reason things out, but only slowly, not clearly.” He took his hands away. “I need someone else’s mind. To feed in what I know, to see what comes out.” He smiled. “A computer. That’s why I’ve told you all this.”

  She didn’t answer his smile. “Are you sure there’s no way of stopping Kendall other than—?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  “There is another way. If I can work quickly enough. Time is the all-important factor. I thought I had two days. Now it seems I have only one.”

  Louise flicked the stub of her cigarette away.

  “That lost day, Axel. That’s something I can’t make out at all. Amnesia?” She shook her head. “No. You are positive it was Friday afternoon when Carla came to see you?”

  Resentful of the question, he spoke shortly. “It was. A man in my position doesn’t lose track of the days. Even so, I checked with the calendar before starting that letter to Nor-ville. It was Friday.”

  “You went to sleep, woke up, came straight here and it was Saturday?”

  “I know what you are going to say, that I could have slept right through. I came up with that idea myself. But it isn’t the answer.” He told her about his discovery while shaving. And because of her suggestion that his hair had been dyed, he mentioned the stained towel.

  “Let me think …” Louise put her palms together. “I still say you could have slept right through that lost day. You say you’d been drugged. That means the chances are you slept deeply. Someone could have used a razor on you while you were asleep. And your hair … It’s been tinted, there’s no doubt about that. You say you haven’t done it, so it could have been done at the same time. The stains on the towel could have been make-up. But why should anyone want to change your appearance without you knowing? I mean, the moment you saw yourself in a mirror you’d know—”

  A mirror … Last night, in the bathroom, he had washed himself without bothering to look in the mirror. But this morning he had done, and had been puzzled by the unfamiliarity of his own face, a puzzlement he had put down to the state of his mind. His features hadn’t been strange, just subtly altered in some way. Just enough to—

  “They didn’t try to change my appearance,” he said. “They only altered it slightly, enough to make me doubt the evidence of my own eyes, to increase the feeling of unreality. Along with the lost day, all part of the plan to make me believe I was going out of my mind.”

  “It could be.” She was doubtful. “It all seems so—complicated. My idea was that they had made you up to resemble someone else.”

  He stared at her. “Why on earth should they do that?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about that conductor who thought he recognised you. What name did he call you?”

  “Adrian Wolfax.” Axel dismissed the idea. “Just a coincidence.”

  “They do happen,” she admitted. “Nobody knows that better than I. But supposing it wasn’t a coincidence, suppos
ing they had tried to make you look like this Wolfax person. And supposing they deliberately frightened you into leaving the house.”

  “A wealth of supposition.” He smiled. “You’re forgetting that they had turned the place into a prison. I had to force my way out.”

  “You only thought you did.”

  “And the man waiting outside, the guard who chased after me?”

  “Not a guard at all, but someone waiting for a man called Adrian Wolfax. But you scotched the whole thing by jumping on the bus.”

  “We’re going round in circles,” Axel said flatly.

  “And wasting time. You said you’d only one day left in which to stop your brother-in-law. Is that today, Axel?”

  He reached to take the crumpled list from her lap.

  “I don’t know how far he’s got. All I do know, from what Carla told me, is that Kendall has unlimited funds at his disposal, that he’s been buying for four days and that another two days will see him in the clear. That was on Friday. He had yesterday, but he wouldn’t have been able to do all that much on a Saturday. Today, Sunday, he’ll be able to do even less, nothing much more than paving the way for tomorrow. I would say that tomorrow will be the last day. If he hasn’t been stopped before the Market closes—”

  “How can he be stopped, Axel?”

  “By—” About to explain the intricacies of the thing, he changed his mind. “It would take too long to tell you. And you’d be none the wiser at the end. What I need is someone to act on my behalf behind the scenes. It must be a man I can trust and whose status carries weight.”

  Louise leaned sideways to look at the long list. ‘‘In all those—you say all those belong to you—surely there must be someone.”

  “Names.” He shook his head. “Signatures on paper, nothing more. I deal in figures, not personalities.”