by Gil North
The surgeon looked angry.
“Nothing,” he said shortly. “Nothing.”
“And the tap on the gas-pipe,” the coroner said. “Stiff, we’re told. Not loose.”
“She was lying peacefully in bed,” said the surgeon. “I saw her when I got there.”
“A strong-minded woman,” said the coroner, “to turn on the gas and get quietly into bed. Or a woman driven to extremity.”
Wright was in the box, recalled after giving his original evidence of identification. Cluff watched him and he was nervous. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. His fingers tensed and relaxed on the rail of the box. His face was very pale. The lock of hair on his forehead was more lifeless than ever.
“Alfred Wright,” said the coroner. “Twenty-eight years of age. Married for exactly thirteen months. In Gunnarshaw”—he said this distastefully, as if Gunnarshaw was the worse for it—“for almost eighteen months. Of no fixed occupation.”
“Commission Agent’s clerk,” Wright said.
“At present?”
“Builder’s labourer,” Wright corrected himself.
The coroner asked silkily, “Your relations with your wife?”
“What do you mean?” Wright replied, controlling his voice with difficulty.
“What I say,” said the coroner. “The difference in your ages. A little unusual, to say the least of it.”
“We got on. Why shouldn’t we? We had ups and downs like anyone else.”
“The financial position?” said the coroner. “Who maintained the household?”
“Me.”
“Exclusively?”
“As well as I could. Luck’s been against me.”
“Your wife had money of her own?”
“Some,” Wright said, sulking. “It was her own affair.”
The coroner thumbed his papers.
“Not much left, it seems,” the coroner said. “Where were you on the night she died?”
“Working.”
Someone tittered.
“Straight I was,” Wright insisted.
The coroner settled back in his chair. He made himself comfortable. “Elaborate,” he commanded.
“At Thorshall.”
The coroner kept his mouth closed.
“A village seven miles away,” the clerk interrupted.
“Where do you think I come from?” the coroner remarked, testily.
Wright explained. “I’ve been doing a job up there these last few weeks. A day or two now and again.”
“Yes?” the coroner said.
“At Ghyll End.”
The coroner consulted his file. “Your wife was aware of this?” he asked.
“Of course.”
Mrs. Toogood whispered audibly to the woman next to her: “She said nothing to me about it.”
“Did your wife object to your frequent absences?”
“I was working, wasn’t I?”
“The dog. She was fond of the dog?”
“Too fond. She’d had it for years.”
“And affected by its loss?”
“It might have been a kid, not a dog.”
“You don’t know what happened to the dog?”
“I was going to get her another.”
“These spinsters,” the coroner thought. “I can’t imagine her as a married woman.”
“I have to ask you,” the coroner said. “Do you know of any reason why your wife should take her own life?”
“She wasn’t well.”
“Ah,” said the coroner who, even after fifteen years, had a lively recollection of difficulty with his own wife in her forties. “She attended a doctor?”
“She was afraid of doctors.”
“She never talked of suicide?”
“Not in so many words,” Wright said slowly. “She got depressed at times.”
“He’s lying,” Cluff thought. “She was the bravest woman I know.”
They all stood up.
The coroner disappeared behind the stage. Cluff remained in the hall until the others left. He walked along a corridor to the double doors leading into the High Street. Mole was standing on the Town Hall steps, waiting for him.
“What did I tell you?” Mole said. “Suicide. While the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
“It could be,” Cluff thought. “If I know about loneliness, what do I know of love? She was a woman. Wright saw it and we didn’t.”
Inspector Mole looked up at the clock in the church-tower.
“It’s hardly worth while going back to the station before dinner,” Mole said. “I think I’ll go home and get mine.”
“When she realized her foolishness,” Cluff told himself, “when she saw him as he was, after he’d married her for what he could get, a home, money—She needn’t have been ashamed to admit her mistake. We’d have understood. Why hadn’t we the sense to offer what Wright only pretended to offer? We abandoned her. We left her with nothing but Wright.”
Mole walked away, his triumph defeated by Cluff’s remoteness.
“Mr. Cluff,” a voice said. “It’s over, isn’t it? There’s nothing else the police can do?”
The reporter was a junior, his previous experience confined to weddings and funerals, the published result of his labours no more than lists of guests or mourners.
“Over?” Cluff repeated. “Over?”
“I thought for a while there was going to be some excitement in Gunnarshaw,” the reporter said, in disappointed tones. “It’s too much to hope for in this hole.”
The High Street looked very clean, its roadway white. The sky was a hard, steely blue. The sun was brilliant, though without warmth. The air was so clear that every detail of the moors surrounding the town stood out. Light sparkled on the stained-glass windows of the church.
“There he goes,” the reporter said. “They can’t do anything to him. But I’d think twice about showing my face here in future if I was him.”
The reporter was alone.
“Well,” the reporter said aloud, “fancy Cluff going off like that, without a word.”
Cluff, in Wright’s wake, did not look back.
Chapter X
Sergeant Cluff walked along the pavement, past the shops and the banks, the library and the public houses. He did not attempt to catch Wright up. His bulk was conspicuous and, in spite of his unhurried progress, he moved with a sense of purpose. At the bottom of the street Wright turned and saw him. The Sergeant continued forward with the same deliberation.
Wright quickened his pace. He turned left, up a narrower road. He went some way along it until he came to a passageway between the buildings. He stopped there for a moment. Cluff had turned the corner too. His tweed hat was pulled well down over his eyes. One hand was in the pocket of his Burberry. He had his walking-stick in the other. Wright could hear its regular beat on the flags.
The passage along which Wright walked, not far from running now, was straight. It had high blank walls on either side. It ended at a railing, beyond which a stream flowed. The footway went off to the left, beside the railing. Cluff’s footsteps echoed in the confined space of the passage.
Wright came to a bridge. The bridge was of planks laid together. On its other side wide concrete steps, with short, black strips of rubber set in them, climbed in a curve up the side of a hill. Wright reached the top of the steps. Cluff was crossing the bridge below him. Wright fled between two rows of houses.
He was going faster than ever. He forced himself not to turn his head again. He was sure he could hear that solid tread still behind him. He was hot, his forehead wet with sweat. His breath came jerkily and his legs hardly held him up. The street he was following brought him into Sevastopol Road.
Wright’s resolution collapsed. He swung round. Cluff was advancing at
exactly the same pace, presenting exactly the same appearance. There was no one else to be seen, not so much as a dog moving. The house doors were closed, the neatly curtained windows empty.
Sevastopol Road was long and surprisingly wide. It was little used by traffic and few people in this part of Gunnarshaw owned cars. Wright passed a grey-stone school set in a square of tar macadam. A long way ahead of him the many-windowed, soaring wall of a mill seemed to block the street with an impassable barrier.
He strained his ears by the school, hoping to catch at least a faint hum from its scholars. He pulled back his left sleeve to look at his watch. The time wanted a few minutes of midday. In spite of his isolation he did not dare to wait for the school to erupt its children, or for men and women to crowd from the mill. He wanted to delay until Sevastopol Road was filled with people and, if he did, Cluff would overtake him. Balaclava Street was farther off than ever he had known it to be.
Wright came to where the back street between Balaclava Street and the street adjoining branched from Sevastopol Road. Though the wider streets on to which the fronts of the houses faced were unpaved the back streets were surfaced with square stones. These stones were uneven. They inclined inwards from the walls of the backyards, to a central trough. Wright stumbled and tripped up the slope. He could see open doors over the walls, women moving in sculleries and living-rooms. His confidence began to return. He dodged under a line of washing. He glanced back down the slope. Cluff was passing across the entrance to the back street. The Sergeant vanished.
Wright turned into the yard of her house, his now. He opened the back door which the police had had repaired. The window Cluff had broken had been replaced but the house was cold. He debated whether to make a fire and he was reluctant to expend the effort.
He stood in the living-room, regretting the memory he had of it when he came downstairs in the mornings. He remembered it warm, the kettle boiling on the hob, his food ready for him on the table. He was sleepy, not having slept well for the past week. It was not the fact that she had died in the bed in the room above that worried him but his recollection of her in the bed alive.
The smallness of Gunnarshaw, the knowledge of its people about each other, oppressed him. He felt suddenly that there was nowhere in Gunnarshaw he could turn, that Sergeant Cluff, if he was not around the first corner, must always be waiting round the second. They could not avoid each other. He could not get out of Cluff’s way, nor the way of anyone else in Gunnarshaw. He despised its people and he knew he was cleverer than they were. He had looked on them as pigeons ready to be plucked and, when he thought about it afterwards, he had always been astonished that his projects never quite seemed to reach fruition. The people made him uneasy. His only success, his marriage, was going sour in his mouth. He had no reason to be afraid, but he felt the stab of fear.
She was up there, in the front bedroom, released by the coroner after the post-mortem. He longed for the lights and the companionship of the pubs in which he had spent his evenings during the period of his marriage. He knew that even his drinking cronies would shun him if he dared to appear in public before the funeral. He was free from her importunities, her constant desire to talk to him, to hear him reply, but the house was hateful to him. The lack of her care and servile attention was worse than the urgency of her want and her loneliness.
He found himself climbing the stairs. He stopped halfway, his hand on the banister. He asked himself how it had been a bad year. He consoled himself that he knew his capacity at last. He had advanced step by step from the immaturity that had weighed on him. His wife had been the first step, and the biggest. He was no longer afraid of rebuffs. His way was clear before him.
He was in the front bedroom, the cold forgotten. He gazed at the closed coffin.
“Shall we open it for you?” they’d asked when they brought it. “It’s all right. She looks the same as she always did. Perhaps people will want to see her for the last time.”
“No,” he’d said. “No.”
Lowering his voice, he’d added an apology. “I want to remember her living. Don’t open it. Please.”
His voice had broken artistically and, if they didn’t respect him, at least they’d gone away feeling a little pity.
“Yes,” he thought. “I picked you out, Amy, the first moment I saw you. I could tell what you were, from your manner, from your clothes. I could read your yearning in your eyes. You had to be the one. There was no one else with anything to give to me. All the others, they looked at me and they knew me. But your eyes were blind. You weren’t stingy with your money. You imagined money could buy what you wanted. You’d more money than I dared to hope.”
Wright’s hand crept automatically over the inside pocket of his jacket. It caressed the bulge of his wallet.
Wright said aloud, “Surely you didn’t expect me to give up everything in return for the little you had to offer me?”
Something was wrong with the room. It wasn’t as it ought to be. He considered for a long time what it was before the solution came to him. He crossed the floor to draw the curtains.
Strips of thicker cloth hung down in folds on both sides of the window. A length of net shielded its lower half, concealing from people passing outside what was inside but allowing to the occupants of the room a view of the street beneath.
Wright’s hand crushed the cloth of the long curtain. His heart raced, hammering in his chest for outlet. He was nailed to the boards on which he stood. If she had been rising from her coffin behind him he could not have turned to face her.
A gas-lamp was planted immediately opposite to the window, on the far pavement. At this hour only the minute flame of its pilot light showed. It was not very tall, painted green, thicker at the base, narrowing into a fluted shaft, blossoming into a lantern above an iron arm on which maintenance men propped their ladders.
Cluff leaned against the lamp, idle, nonchalant, large in the grey afternoon. His eyes were on the window through which Wright was peering. He was motionless, his face shadowed by the flopping brim of his hat, his hands in his pockets, his stick dangling from his right wrist. He stared at the net across the window as if he could see through it. The stone of the wall was no bar to his vision.
Cluff did not stir. Nor did Wright. Wright gripped the curtain, his arm raised, frozen in the beginning of motion. The afternoon began to fade. The pilot light above the time-clock in the lamp shone more brightly as the dusk gathered. If anyone in the other houses about was watching Cluff he stayed unperturbed. If it was cold where he was he gave no sign of it. No one went up the street or down it. The ordinary inhabitants of Balaclava Street never used their front doors, except for visitors. There were no visitors to Balaclava Street on a weekday.
When the lamp lit up Wright imagined he could hear the click of the mechanism releasing the flow of gas to the mantle. The light flowed into the bedroom. He was suddenly certain that Cluff would see him, darkly outlined against the window. He realized that he was shivering. The muscles of his lifted arm ached with cramp. His fingers would hardly open. He had to force himself to let the curtain go. He exercised an infinite care so that the curtain should not quiver and reveal his presence to the watcher across the street.
Wright sidled round the room against the wall. He had to cross the room, in front of the window, to reach the door on to the landing. He dropped to his knees and crawled past the coffin, pressing himself to the floor to keep below the level of the window-sill.
He fled, into the bedroom at the back, into the room where he had slept with Amy, away from Cluff. He flung himself on to the bed. Tears started into his eyes. He trembled so much that the bed creaked with his shaking. At last he pulled himself up. He sat on the edge of the bed. He dragged the quilt and the blankets free, wrapping them round him like shawls. He did not get any warmer. The darkness closed round him. There was no lamp near in the back street on to which this room faced and the blinds w
ere drawn in the windows of the houses across from this one.
Wright could not stay where he was. He could not rest. He could not prevent himself from creeping frequently into the bedroom at the front. Always when he lifted his head carefully to the level of the window he saw Cluff still watching. There was no change in Cluff’s position. For all the change there was in Cluff he might have been dead on his feet.
Wright’s belly rumbled with hunger. His limbs were lumps of ice.
“What can he get me for?” Wright asked himself frantically. “There’s nothing he can do. What am I frightened of?”
He started downstairs. He was determined to march along the passage. His mind was made up to throw open the front door. He was going out to face Cluff. He intended to shout, so that everyone could hear, “Hi, Cluff! What are you hanging about out there for? If there’s anything you want, let me know. Get it over with, and get gone.”
Wright told himself, “This is what I’ll say. I’ll say, ‘If you don’t stop spying on me I’ll go to the station. I’ll complain to the Superintendent. I haven’t forgotten the other night. You were going to hit me then, weren’t you? It was only that other constable coming in stopped you. You can’t get away with this sort of thing. You don’t seem to realize—we’re more than halfway through the twentieth century. The police can’t do as they like. Haven’t there been inquiries enough? Oh no, I might not be much. But let me tell you, fellows like me aren’t to be trodden on these days. Come on. If you’ve got anything to say, spit it out.’”
He had his hand on the handle of the door. He didn’t turn the handle. He didn’t go out to face Cluff. He began to try to occupy himself about the house. He made a fire in the living-room. He boiled a kettle of water. He brewed some tea and drank it.
He kept going upstairs. The window in the front bedroom was a magnet to him. He wandered up and down the passage to the front door. He edged into the downstairs parlour and out again.