Final Witness

by J F Straker

  ‘Sounds promising,’ he told Susan. ‘He’s not the loquacious type, but the whisky may help.’

  If the whisky loosened the West Indian’s tongue it did not make him more informative; he talked round Winstone and then, somewhat guardedly, about him, but what he said was not what his listeners wanted to hear. Even leading questions were nudged gently aside.

  ‘You say you know he took a beating,’ David said. ‘Do you know why?’

  The guitarist shrugged. ‘His wife went with another man. It happens.’

  That was one way of putting it, thought Susan. She did not like the man. He talked to David, but his eyes were on her, and she objected to the look in them. It was encompassing rather than appreciative.

  David was uncertain how to proceed. If that was the explanation Winstone had given it would be unwise to refute it. He was there to obtain information, not to dispense it.

  ‘Winstone came to see me last night,’ he said slowly. ‘He asked me to help him get his wife back. I’d like to do that. Can you tell me the other man’s name?’

  The pink eyes moved reluctantly from Susan to David. ‘No,’ he said, after an interval. ‘George didn’t say.’

  David was in no doubt that the man was lying, but he was puzzled as to why. Was it fear of Bandy, suspicion of his questioner’s integrity, or merely uncertainty of what Winstone would wish him to say? David decided that he too would play safe.

  ‘I’m handicapped by knowing so little about them,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can help me there. How long have they been separated?’

  The question fared little better than the others. The guitarist had joined the band about six months previously, when Nora had been the vocalist. Then Nora had left and he had taken over her job, and a few weeks later Winstone had announced that he and Nora were no longer living together. ‘She still comes here sometimes,’ he said, finishing his drink. ‘Once a month, maybe.’

  David ordered another whisky sour. ‘Are they considering a divorce?’ he asked.

  The man did not know. Nor could he tell them anything of Nora’s family. He seemed to have lost all interest in the topic of George Winstone, and his eyes were again embracing Susan. They were large, magnetic eyes which she found difficulty in avoiding, and she was glad when he uncoiled his long body from the chair and stood up.

  ‘Got to be getting back,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the drink, man.’

  ‘One last question.’ David stood up too. ‘Where can I find Winstone? He forgot to give me his address.’

  ‘Maybe he ain’t got one,’ the man said, avoiding David’s eyes. ‘Could be.’

  He nodded to Susan and loped back to the stage.

  An indeterminate victory, thought David. It enabled him to crow over his godfather and Snowball, but it carried him no farther in his inquiries.

  Susan said, ‘Well, thank goodness that’s over. May we dance now?’

  They danced. David’s energy was somewhat below par, but it was sufficient to clear all but the most determined shufflers from the floor. Susan enjoyed it. She would have preferred his arms tight about her, his cheek against hers. But that was a hold she had not yet experienced with David, and it was fun to indulge occasionally in the uninhibited antics that constituted his almost primitive form of dancing. Even the band seemed to respond to him. The music grew hotter, the trumpet was no longer muted.

  Her cheeks were flushed when eventually they sat down. She said breathlessly, ‘That was fun. Do we go now, or do we wait for them to throw us out?’

  ‘A load of fairies like this lot?’ He waved a contemptuous arm to indicate the other customers. ‘I’d like to see them try. We’ll cut a few more capers first.’

  They cut a few more capers. Susan began to enjoy them less. With the wine he had drunk at dinner (Susan’s share of the bottle had been meagre) and the whiskies and champagne since, David’s footwork was less sure. He was also perspiring freely; drops of sweat trickled down into his eyes, his hair hung lankly over his forehead, his hands were moist and clammy. After their third spell on the floor Susan said weakly, ‘I can’t take it like I used to, darling. Isn’t it time we went home?’

  He agreed that it was. Although pride would not let him admit it, either by words or a slackening of tempo, he was more than ready to quit; he was unused to violent exercise, and his headache was returning. As they came up the steps into Greek Street he drew in great gulps of the night air, sweet and moist after the rain.

  ‘We’ll walk to Piccadilly and take the tube from there,’ he said. ‘Do us good after the fug down there.’

  She would have preferred a taxi, but she did not argue. She clung to his arm and prayed that her feet would carry her the distance. David, she knew, liked to walk untrammelled. But he could not have it both ways. She would never make it unaided.

  Half-way down Shaftesbury Avenue he said, ‘If Lumsden doesn’t ring in the morning I’m sunk. Or do I go down to Rotherhithe and sit on his doorstep, waiting for him to come home?’ He looked up at the sky. There were no stars visible. ‘A bleak prospect. It will probably rain like hell.’

  Susan said, ‘Why concentrate on the man? Can’t you find the girl? You said yourself she must live close by, or they’d never have chosen a place like that in which to park.’

  ‘I’ve tried the girls. The only two who admit to being out late that night and who showed any guilt reaction were Judy Garland and the Einsdorp girl. I don’t think it was the first, and I’m damned sure it wasn’t the second.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of her voice. And the twitches. She just couldn’t make a boyfriend.’

  Susan sighed; partly in sympathy, partly from weariness.

  ‘Poor thing! Fancy having to go through life handicapped like that. It must be sheer hell. Was it an accident, do you think?’

  ‘Probably. She might not be bad-looking if her face would keep still, but it won’t.’ He fumbled with his free hand for a cigarette. ‘Mina. That’s an unusual name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ummm! Probably a diminutive.’

  ‘Could be. Short for Wilhelmina, perhaps. Wilhelmina Einsdorp. What a mouthful! I suppose it’s Dutch, but that doesn’t make it any easier.’

  ‘I was at school with a girl named Wilhelmina,’ Susan said. ‘She wasn’t Dutch, she was Irish. We used to call her Bill.’

  David grunted, feeling for his lighter. ‘You’d need to shorten it to something. Mina or Bill, it — Oh, no!’

  He stopped so abruptly that Susan nearly fell forward on her face. David clutched her and swung her round. Eyes shining, he looked down at her ecstatically. Passers-by eyed them curiously, but David ignored them.

  ‘Susan, you’re a genius!’ He was beside himself with glee. ‘Bill! Why the hell didn’t I think of that myself?’

  It was a pity, thought Susan, as she was enveloped in his embrace, that he had to choose Shaftesbury Avenue in which to kiss her. She would have preferred less publicity. But she did not protest. A kiss from David was always welcome, no matter where it took place.

  The embrace over, they walked on. There was a new liveliness to David’s step, so that Susan was almost running. Breathlessly she said, ‘I don’t want to quench your enthusiasm, darling, but aren’t you taking a lot for granted? Even supposing your Mina is also known as Bill, how can you be sure she’s the right Bill? You said yourself she couldn’t make a boy-friend.’

  ‘Well, I was wrong. I don’t know how she managed it, but a boyfriend she’s got. Or had. And I suspect it’s Robert Lumsden.’

  ‘I still don’t see how you can be so sure.’

  ‘Because of the likeness.’ Genially he patted the hand on his arm. ‘Remember I told you there was something familiar about her? Well, now I’ve got it. If that girl isn’t related to Nora Winstone in some way I’ll eat my hat.’

  10

  As the telephone bell jangled into his dream David stirred uneasily, turned on to his stomach, and buried his nose in the pillows. But the bell went on ringing, an
d suddenly he was wide awake.

  ‘Lumsden!’

  He had forgotten to put the telephone by the bed. Flinging the blankets aside, he went quickly across the room and picked up the receiver. But the caller was Paul, not Lumsden. Paul had had a new Jaguar delivered the previous day, and he wanted to take it down to the coast. He was, however, without a chauffeur; the man had been given the day off. Would David care to drive the car for him?

  ‘Sorry,’ David said, not without regret. ‘No dice. I have to work.’

  ‘On a Sunday? Don’t journalists have a union?’

  ‘It’s the Winstone case,’ David explained. ‘I’ve a new lead, I think. Can’t afford to ignore it. Thanks for the champagne, by the way. It went down well.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, dear boy. Well, be seeing you. Sorry you can’t make it today.’

  David went back to bed, but not to sleep. It was only eight o’clock, but already he was wide awake. He lay thinking about Lumsden, and considering what he should say to the man when he rang. He must not be too explicit. Lumsden’s anxiety must be aroused, but it must not be satisfied. Not over the telephone. The man had to be convinced that to confide in David was his wisest course, that Topical Truths had his best interests at heart and was prepared to pay for the privilege of safeguarding them. If fear could not persuade him cupidity might.

  But to ensure success a meeting was imperative.

  At eight-thirty he got up and dressed and had his breakfast. For the next hour he sat by the telephone, reading the Sunday newspapers but assimilating little of what he read. By ten o’clock, when Lumsden still had not rung, he knew that expectancy was not to be fulfilled. Either the man had not read the note, or he intended to disregard it.

  Yesterday, when Lumsden had been his sole hope, such a disappointment would have filled David with gloom. It would have meant that his assignment had come to a full stop. But now he had Mina. He went out into the sunshine, stripped the cover from the Alvis, gave the brasswork a final, loving polish, checked oil, water, and tyre pressures. He was fed up with trains and buses. Today he would spoil himself and take the Alvis. It would be some compensation for having to pass up the opportunity to drive Paul’s Jaguar.

  He drove down to Rotherhithe at a steady pace, enjoying the envious glances of enthusiasts and small boys and the curious stares of the uninitiated. Arrived at St James’s Road, he parked the Alvis and walked the remaining fifty yards to the house. Lumsden was almost certain to be out. But at least it might be possible to discover whether the man had had his note.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized to the woman. ‘It’s me again. I suppose Mr Lumsden is out?’

  ‘He’s more than out,’ she told him. ‘He’s gone. Left this morning.’

  ‘Gone?’ This was something he should have anticipated. ‘Gone for good, do you mean?’

  ‘He didn’t say so, but I shouldn’t be surprised.’ There was a look on her face he had not seen there before, a look of curiosity mingled with apprehension. ‘Said he was off for a holiday, be away about a fortnight. But he took all his things. What’s left is mostly rubbish.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’ She shook her head. ‘I suppose he got my note?’

  ‘He got it.’

  She hesitated, her mouth open as though about to say more. Then it closed with a snap, and without another word she went back into the house and slammed the door. David guessed what was bothering her. She must have read his note, or Lumsden had told her its content, and she had assumed it was the cause of her lodger’s sudden departure. No doubt she was also wondering what the danger that threatened him might be.

  She could be right about the note, he thought, as he walked back to the Alvis. It could have panicked Lumsden into immediate action, so that he upped and bolted without waiting to telephone. Or perhaps there had been no need to telephone. Perhaps he had already recognized the danger.

  It was Mrs Einsdorp who opened the door in Rose End to him. She was a little woman, with a grey, lined face and thinning, straggly grey hair. Her eyes were red, and David wondered if she had been crying. He wondered too at her age. She must be well over sixty, he thought. How did she come to have a daughter as young as Mina?

  She shook her head when he asked to speak to the girl. Mina, she told him, was away. She had left early that morning.

  David was disappointed, but not surprised. Assuming that Mina and Lumsden were the missing witnesses to the murder of Constable Dyerson, then it was natural to suppose that if one disappeared the other would go also; and since it was unlikely that they had received separate intelligence of the danger threatening them, Lumsden must have warned the girl. Had they gone together?

  He said, ‘Your daughter’s full name is Wilhelmina, isn’t it?’ She nodded. Confident now that he was on the right track, he went on briskly, ‘It’s important that I get in touch with her at once, Mrs Einsdorp. May I have her address?’

  There was no doubt she had been crying. She did not ask his business with the girl, but shook her head wearily, the tears beginning to well in her tired eyes.

  ‘She didn’t leave no address,’ she said, and sniffed. ‘She just went. Early this morning it was, before I was up. There was a letter she wrote...’ She fumbled in her apron pocket. David hoped he was about to be shown the letter, but it was a handkerchief she produced. With it she dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. ‘It was on the kitchen table when I come down. Said she’d be writing in a day or so, and not to worry. But it didn’t say where she’d be.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently, his disappointment fading before her obvious grief and the knowledge that, if the couple were lost to him, they were also lost to Bandy and the police. ‘Perhaps I should explain why I’m here. I’m a journalist, and it happens that my magazine is interested in your daughter. We know quite a lot about her. In fact, I may even be able to tell you the reason for her sudden departure.’ She looked at him in bewilderment, and he smiled reassuringly. ‘May I come in for a few minutes? I think you and I should have a little chat.’

  She took him into the small front room, but because she did not sit down herself he felt compelled to stand. A photograph in an ornamental wooden frame on the sideboard caught his eye; it depicted a young man in a stiff high collar standing erect and unsmiling behind a young woman seated on a chair. The young woman was holding a baby.

  Presumably this was the Einsdorp family; he could see the resemblance between Mrs Einsdorp and the young woman in the photograph. Yet on the mount, written in a faded, spidery hand, was the date — July 1924. That, according to David’s reckoning, made Mina’s age to be thirty-eight!

  So the baby was not Mina. Mina had said she was twenty-one. She might be a few years older, but she certainly wasn’t thirty-eight.

  He said, ‘Mina isn’t your only child, is she? Haven’t you an elder daughter? Nora? Nora Winstone?’

  She sat down then. She sat as though she were unused to sitting, her meagre body perched on the edge of a hard wooden chair, her roughened hands in her lap. The apron looked too big for her, concealing almost entirely the blue blouse and skirt beneath. The woollen stockings were wrinkled, the fur on her slippers had moulted.

  Yes, she said, she had another daughter. Nora had left home at sixteen, and her visits since had been very infrequent.

  ‘Sometimes we don’t see her for months. Only the name’s not Winstone, sir; it’s Einsdorp, same as ours. Dad’s parents were Dutch, you see. But Nora mostly uses her stage name. Desnay, it is.’

  She spelt it out for him, and he thanked her. ‘Is she married?’ he asked.

  Her reddened eyes looked at him quickly, and then fell. ‘No,’ she whispered. And then, louder, ‘No, she never married.’

  That puzzled David. Had Nora kept her marriage a secret from her parents, knowing they would not approve? Since she had left home so young and visited them so seldom, it seemed unlikely that their approval could be important to her. Or was the old lady lying? Was that the cause of her
confusion? Had she refused to accept the fact that she had a coloured son-in-law?

  Although now plagued by a new problem, he at least had the answer to an old one. Robert Lumsden had denied Nora Winstone, but no doubt he, together with others listed in the woman’s diary, would have admitted knowledge of Nora Desnay. Come to think of it, he had two new problems, not one. If Nora had been so cavalier in her treatment of her parents, why should she be so devoted to her young sister that she was prepared to suffer Bandy’s anger and brutality to ensure the girl’s safety? At the time Nora left home Mina could only just have been born. And since then? Just a few very infrequent visits, and apparently no other contact. How could sisterly love and devotion grow and flourish on such sparse acquaintance?

  David thought he had the answer. He said gently, ‘I don’t want to seem impertinent, Mrs Einsdorp, but are you being entirely truthful? Don’t you in fact have only the one daughter? Mina is Nora’s child, isn’t she?’

  She sat so still that at first he thought she had not heard him. But he did not repeat the question; he moved to a chair and waited patiently. Presently a shudder convulsed the frail body, and he wondered uneasily if she were crying again. But when she looked at him the red-rimmed eyes were dry.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She’s Nora’s daughter.’ And added inconsequentially, ‘Nora calls her Bill.’

  He got the whole unhappy story from her by degrees. The family had been living in Bermondsey then. Mr Einsdorp had inherited some of the strict Calvinistic principles of his Dutch forebears, and had subjected his daughter to a stern discipline — a discipline against which Nora, spoiled and petted and protected by her mother, had secretly rebelled. The rebellion had terminated in the discovery by Mrs Einsdorp that Nora was pregnant; although she had kept the discovery from her husband for as long as possible, two months before the baby was born he had turned the girl out of the house, and had told her not to return. From that day to this, said the old lady, he had neither seen her nor spoken to her.