by Gil North
Six o’clock and Cluff was still there. Seven o’clock. Eight o’clock.
“Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!” Wright sobbed.
He threw caution to the winds. A wildness seized him, a carelessness as to the consequences. He ran round the house like a madman. He switched on the lights in the passage, on the stairs, in the bedrooms. He stood by the coffin, his hand on it, upright, facing directly to the window.
He shouted, “We’re up here, both of us. Are you satisfied? Can you see us now?”
He waved his other hand up and down. He ran to the window and started to push and tug at the lower frame. It was stuck and he couldn’t move it. He panted as he struggled and banged his fists against the frame to jerk it loose. It moved a little and then the sashcord to his right came off its pulley, broken, snaking down on his arm.
Wright stopped fighting the window. The strength and the madness left him. He looked out in despair. Cluff stood in the middle of the street. His shoes were hidden in the grass. Wright could see the marks of his feet in a line behind him to the lamp-post.
Cluff stared up at the window. The light from the gas-lamp flickered over his shoulder. The light from the bedroom passed above his head. His face was in shadow.
Cluff turned slowly. He set off down the hill, still on the grass and mud, disdaining to walk on the flags by the houses. He stopped twice. He looked back, up at the window, as if he wanted to leave no doubts in Wright’s mind.
He had gone.
Chapter XI
Superintendent Patterson of the Criminal Investigation Department reached into his dip at County Police Headquarters and took out another file. He wished fervently that he was less concerned with administration and more directly with crime. He read the title of the file, raising his brows a little. He opened it and skimmed through the topmost enclosure. A minute in its margin informed him: “The leave requested is due. There would appear to be no objection.” A question mark followed the last word.
The telephone rang. Patterson picked up the receiver. He listened and said, “Put him through.”
Patterson asked, “Is that you, Cluff?”
“I wrote a letter,” the telephone said.
“I have it in front of me now,” the Superintendent replied.
Patterson looked out of his window. The fine weather had vanished during the night. The window was mottled with drops of water, dissolving here and there into tiny rivulets. The buildings he could see were black and dirty with the smoke of the city. Their roofs were very close to the sky.
“Why?—” Patterson began. “Good God, man! At this time of year?”
Patterson thought, “Steady, but not clever. A plodder. Where else could I post him when he came back from the war? If he was born in the Gunnarshaw division, he’s honest. Too honest. He thinks with his heart. There’s no serious crime there. He knows the people. He can’t help finding out what he wants to find out. With a war record like his I couldn’t put him under a younger man.”
“Call it urgent private affairs, if you like,” came Cluff’s voice.
“There’s nothing wrong?” the Superintendent asked. “Nothing I can do?”
“No.”
“I can’t send you a relief,” Patterson said. “I haven’t a man available.”
“I shall be at home. They could reach me there.”
“What?” exclaimed the Superintendent. “At home!”
“I shan’t be leaving the division. Not so far as I know.”
The Superintendent shuffled papers in his file-dip. “Wait a moment. That woman. There was a preliminary report here somewhere.”
“Suicide,” said Cluff. “They held the inquest yesterday.”
“Of course,” Patterson answered.
Cluff sounded truculent, “I’m entitled to leave. It’s a long time since I had any.”
“You didn’t ask,” the Superintendent pointed out. “When do you want to start?”
“Now.”
“Unorthodox,” thought the Superintendent. “He’s the same age as me. He ought to have got farther than he has done. No sense of discipline. He does as he wants, but I like him. I’m not the Chief Constable.”
“You know your business better than I do,” Patterson said. “Fifteen days?”
“Or less,” he heard Cluff say.
“Very well.”
“Excuse me,” Cluff said. “I’m on my way to a funeral.”
“A relative?”
“Not even by marriage.”
“Enjoy yourself,” the Superintendent was going to say, referring to Cluff’s leave. He realized the ineptness of his remark after the Sergeant’s latest comment. The line went dead.
Cluff turned away from the phone.
“Annie,” Cluff shouted. “I’m off.”
He bent and lifted Jenet. Jenet twisted and writhed. He couldn’t hold her. She jumped out of his arms and walked, dignified, to her place by the fire.
“No, Clive,” Cluff said. “Not this time.”
He drove away. Annie stood in the porch, shaking her head, Clive beside her, his tail drooping.
Cluff brought his car to a halt in Sevastopol Road, just past the entrance to Balaclava Street. He looked at his watch, sitting behind the wheel. After a while a hearse went by, followed by a single taxi. Both reversed up the slope and stopped near the gas-lamp by which Cluff had stood for so long after the inquest.
Cluff got out of his car. He waited at the corner, keeping well back so that he shouldn’t easily be noticeable from Wright’s house. A boy on a bicycle, only one hand on the handlebars, the other holding a large spray of flowers, pedalled fast from the centre of the town. He dismounted at the bottom of Balaclava Street. Cluff stepped forward, from the doorway of the grocer’s shop.
“Give them to the driver,” Cluff told the boy. “Ask him to put them on the coffin.”
“O.K., Sergeant,” the boy said.
“Look sharp,” Cluff ordered. “You’re late. Let me have that bicycle. I’ll put it against the wall for you.”
The boy examined the flowers.
“I’m sure I haven’t dropped it,” the boy said, pushing his cap farther on to the back of his head. “It’s just as they gave it to me in the shop.”
“Hurry!”
“Didn’t you put a card on it, Sergeant? How will they know who it’s from?”
“Don’t ask questions, my lad. Just do as you’re told.”
The boy went up the street. The drivers of both the hearse and the taxi had gone into number thirty-three. The boy peered intently through the open front door.
The coffin came out, carried by the two drivers and by a couple of youths supplied by the undertaker. The undertaker, in a top hat and a black frock coat, looking overdressed, preceded it. Wright, by himself, followed.
They put the coffin in the hearse. The boy from the flower-shop handed his flowers to the driver.
The driver reached up to put the flowers on the coffin. Wright went to speak to him. They both searched amongst the blooms, trying to find out who had sent them. In the end Wright nodded. The driver put the spray with two wreaths on the coffin top. He closed the hearse. The undertaker got in beside the driver. Wright sat by himself in the back of the taxi and the two undertaker’s men sat in the front. Hearse and taxi began to come slowly down the hill, between windows every one of which was darkened by lowered blinds or drawn curtains.
Cluff started his car. He fell in behind the taxi. They were almost at the cemetery before Wright became aware of him. The back of Wright’s head in the rear window of the taxi was replaced by Wright’s sharp-featured, white face. Wright’s eyes opened wide. He stared at Cluff, his expression both of surprise and fear. Cluff stared back, grimly.
There was no church service. The parson looked uncomfortable, a man not sure whether he was doing right or wrong, at odds with
his conscience. He met them at the cemetery gate. His vestments clung to him damply and his bald head was wet. Part of his unease was due to his conviction that he would undoubtedly catch a cold. He regretted the nature of his office, which prevented him from wrapping up against the rain.
If the cortège from the house had been meagre quite a number of people lined the cemetery drive. The parson walked ahead of the coffin. Wright, in his place at its rear, was stalked immediately by Cluff, who had abandoned any attempt to conceal himself.
Mrs. Toogood, detaching herself from the spectators, caught up with Cluff.
Mrs. Toogood whispered, “You’d have thought he’d have asked me to go to the house. Especially when she’d no near relatives. If he wanted to put her away quietly, it didn’t work out, did it?”
“I’m surprised there are so many,” Cluff said. “I’m glad they came.”
“She was Gunnarshaw born and bred,” Mrs. Toogood told him. “We’d known her all our lives. We wouldn’t let her go as he wanted. It wasn’t her fault.”
The parson looked back, frowning at the murmur of voices. The procession wound on its way in silence, between headstones of white marble and black marble and grey granite. The sodden grass between the graves was dark and lifeless, with no touch of fresh green about it. The flower-beds bordering the drive were empty, bereft of colour. The trees and the shrubs, which had been planted to relieve the monotony of the cemetery, were all evergreens, dull-leafed.
They got to the wall at the far end of the cemetery. Across the wall a field stretched to a river. At their feet a narrow, deep trench gashed the ground, the earth that had filled it thrown in heaps on its edges. It was crossed at either end by a stout plank on which a broad, cloth sling rested.
The graves in this part of the cemetery had no markers. They were distinguished only by the mounds remaining after they had been closed.
The people stood in a circle round the trench. The parson opened a prayer-book and began to read. Cluff stood close to Wright. He was dimly aware that women were weeping, with handkerchiefs to their eyes, or attempting to restrain their tears.
The parson gabbled, hurrying. Cluff did not listen. He willed Wright not to forget him. Wright shuffled, not watching the grave, but peering about him like a man in the grip of a waking nightmare. Sometimes he half-turned his head as if he would look Cluff in the face, but he never completed the motion. He did not know where to look. His wife’s coffin was in front of him, Cluff behind him. Respect for the dead did not hide the hostility of the mourners on either side.
It was soon over. The parson hastened away to a little chapel, to change and rub his head dry on the towel his wife had made him bring. No one spoke to Wright. Wright walked rapidly along the drive, back to his taxi at the gate. He went so quickly he got there before the driver, who had found someone to talk to.
The dead woman’s acquaintances walked past the taxi. Instead of looking in at Wright, they averted their heads with exaggerated care. He could not hear, as he huddled on the leather seat, in a corner, what they were saying. They were talking animatedly to each other, making up for the silence imposed on them. He knew that they were talking about him. He told himself his ordeal wouldn’t last long. They couldn’t assault him, or harm him. Where was the hurt in words? It was harder than he had expected to retain his calm. The future he had planned failed to give him consolation in his present situation. They could scarcely have treated him worse if they had found him standing over her with a knife in his hand, if they had caught him in the act of killing her.
He looked out of the back window. Cluff’s car was there, drawn up by the roadside behind the taxi. He could see Cluff, bolt upright behind the wheel, his head touching the car hood, big and wide and capable. By Cluff’s side Mrs. Toogood was not so tall, but just as disapproving. They were not talking. They had their eyes glued to the taxi. Wright could not decide which of the two he hated most.
The taxi moved off. Cluff’s car crept after it. The taxi accelerated. So did Cluff.
“He’s only taking her home,” Wright thought. “There’s nothing else he could do.”
His driver heard Wright moan and wondered if he was ill.
Wright was angry with himself for not inviting Mrs. Toogood to the funeral, because he had not separated her from Cluff. He could not forget Cluff in the street yesterday. He could not forget Cluff following him home from the Town Hall. He wanted to make sure about Cluff.
He was sure already, but he still hoped.
Chapter XII
Wright hid behind the parlour window. He peeped out from the side of the curtain. Cluff’s car was parked by the door of number thirty-one.
Wright went back into the living-room. He strained his ears to the wall dividing his house from Mrs. Toogood’s. He despaired of hearing them plainly, but he was avid to catch at least the murmur of their voices.
What were they doing in there? What were they planning?
He remembered Mrs. Toogood’s hostility towards him ever since he had come to live here, her friendship for Amy.
“What do you bother with the old bitch for?” Wright had asked his wife. “You haven’t been round there again, have you? She’s not been in, has she?”
“But I’ve known her ever since I was a child,” Amy said. “She’s always lived next door. She knew my mother.”
“Do you think I don’t know? She’s trying to turn you against me.”
“People used to come here now and then,” his wife said sadly. “Now no one comes. Don’t you want me to have any friends?”
“You’ve got me.”
“Even in the streets people don’t stop and talk to me as they did.”
“You’re well rid of them. Can’t you manage without them? Don’t I mean anything to you?”
“Everything. Everything. You have to mean everything.”
“If I catch you in her house—”
“I can’t ignore—”
“Remember,” he’d said each time he went out. “Keep away from her. Keep away from her, I tell you.”
Wright listened. He could hear nothing.
“What does that woman suspect?” he asked himself. “What did Amy tell her about me?”
“She was loyal,” Wright convinced himself. And this was what he had been relying on. “She wouldn’t give me away. If I made sure she knew where I went, what I did, she couldn’t face the shame of others knowing.”
Doubt nagged at his brain.
“Who’s to say it’s true?” Wright asked himself. “Amy had nothing to show. I never marked her. I was careful about that.”
Wright got up from the wall. He stood in front of the fire.
“Don’t worry,” he told his image in the mirror over the mantel. “There’s nothing anyone can touch you for. It’s over and done with.”
He went into the parlour again. He knew without looking that Cluff’s car had not gone.
“I could leave now,” Wright thought. “I’m safe enough. Why shouldn’t I go? Wouldn’t it be as natural as staying here by myself? Did I promise, or didn’t I, that I’d go back as soon as I could after the funeral?”
He argued with himself: “No. Wait. Not until Cluff’s gone.”
There was a fanlight above the front door. Wright wanted Cluff to know where he was. He switched on the passage light, as he had done the night before. To make quite certain he put on the parlour light as well and drew back the curtains. He felt more secure if others, besides Cluff, saw the lights. He felt more protected from Cluff.
Wright brooded about Cluff.
“I’ve never done anything to him,” he thought. “I haven’t even been in trouble with the police in Gunnarshaw. Amy never mentioned him.”
He remembered the flowers that had arrived before the funeral, unheralded, anonymous. He’d been going to ask, “Boy. Who sent these?” But the boy had gone o
ff too quickly.
“Don’t put them in. Throw them in the street,” he’d been going to say to the hearse-driver. “It’s just an insult.”
He hadn’t had the courage. He’d been afraid of the driver replying, “She’s got few enough flowers. Whoever it was, it was a kind thought.”
Had his wife been cleverer than he’d believed? Who else was there besides Mrs. Toogood? Mrs. Toogood had sent a wreath. Mrs. Toogood wasn’t responsible for the flowers. It occurred to him for the first time that, while he had been away from his wife, his wife had been away from him. He tried to laugh away his suspicions.
“An old maid,” he assured himself. “She wouldn’t dare. She wouldn’t know how to go about it. Who’d play fast and loose with her? Who’d want to? Good God, don’t I know what she was?
“You’re a fool,” Wright told himself. “There wasn’t a single man in forty-five years until you came along.”
What was Cluff doing, aided and encouraged by Mrs. Toogood? Would Cluff spend hours watching him for nothing? Why did a policeman attend the funeral? A Gunnarshaw man, or near enough, as his wife had been a Gunnarshaw woman.
“It’s impossible,” Wright said loudly. “Impossible! If there’d been anything between them I’d have heard about it. I’ve listened to them in the pubs talking about Cluff. They wouldn’t have kept quiet about a thing like that.”
A metal door slammed. Wright jumped. He rushed to the parlour window. An engine sprang into life.
Cluff’s car drove in a half-circle to the opposite pavement, stopped, backed, tried to go forward again. The rear wheels did not bite. They revolved uselessly. Wright was afraid the car was going to get stuck in Balaclava Street. He considered leaving his house to give Cluff a helping hand, anything so long as Cluff went away.
The tyres gripped. The car slid towards Sevastopol Road, bumping and rattling. Wright prayed that it wouldn’t fall to pieces.
Chapter XIII
Wright felt light-hearted, cheerful.
He switched on the radio and remembered Mrs. Toogood, and switched it off again.