But what was this that was happening in his father’s garden? The scent had gone from the stocks, there was a smell of compost in the air. A fret from the morfa had drifted over it, above the level of which only the tall sunflowers reared their tarnished heads like the half-obliterated coronas of an eclipse. And how came it that half the length of the garden away he should see so much more plainly than he had seen that shadowy pair of the hedge close at hand? As through the honeysuckle of the police-station the disturbing word peeped, so the dimness of the garden was faintly populous with shapes that flitted and moved. The herbaceous border was an ambush of comings and goings, not a bush or shrub but something lurked behind it, and stare at them and they were gone. But get them into the eye-corner and they took on phantasmal substance, gait, separateness and glimpses of clothing.
Yet they were no contemporaries of one another, for the first of them to draw earthly breath must have been dead a century before the greater number were born, nor had they any air of knowing one another, but rather of making acquaintance as they met. Against the Victoria plum a garden ladder had been left, and they were making for it as if some common memory drew them, to some place they must revisit, some scene re-enact, and as they approached it now a hairtie was to be distinguished among them, now a pocket-flap, a triple cape, a buckled hat of the Regency, a peg-leg, an eye-patch, a spotted belcher. And, shelled as peas as they were, etiolated and spent, the rattling of resuscitation that rose from them was in the thieves’ patter and caggermagger of centuries ago.
And now, as they grew ever more visible the nearer they drew to the ladder, there were mob-caps and mutches among them, quilted petticoats and tawdry finery, and a glimmer of light was breaking upon Denzil Corydon. They were their hussies and fancy-women, their decoys of the inns and fairs, and they had turned them off in style in those days. They had made a public holiday of it, with gingerbread and oranges and last dying speeches, and if he had been a popular desperado he had had twenty light o’ loves to make his sufferings short under that ladder where in her corduroy slacks Anne had picked her fruit. But as he had fallen back from the highwaymen of the hedge, so his heart gave a bound now. From the greenhouse behind him there had come a sharp, tingling crack, and there was no mistaking the sound that followed it. It was the muffled yet forceful pressure upon a window that is being tampered with, and in his plimsolls he sprang to the crazy pavement.
One by one he knew those panes by this time, and now he was ready to take a long look at their pedigree too. The first of them was the flawed pane that gave their faces the mumpish look as they passed, the next the one where for economy of glass two pieces had been cut to overlap. Steamed and trickling, they had haloed his father’s candle, but now for the moon, they were a reflecting outer surface only, and again it was a moon in bits and pieces, that light-soiled moon of the small hours that by the time sleeping mankind wakes is no more than a vanishing wafer in the sky. There was nothing remarkable about the third pane, but putting his hand to the fourth he drew it quickly back again. Something adhered to his fingers. It was the panel that adjoined the door, and when he advanced his hand again it passed clean through it. A quarter-circle had been cut out, the stickiness was that of the fly-paper or plaster that had muffled the blow, and through the hole the knob and chain could be reached. Stooping, he looked in.
4
For all its suffocation of breathing and sweat the interior was as chill as that morgue where, behind their thin film of running water, the unidentified dead lay, each with his dreadful photograph and particulars at his head. They are the bodies dragged from the river, and the suicide no relative claims, and now he would not have swapped his glimmer of a hunch for a thousand pounds!
No geraniums in their pots, no basket chairs, but a prison ante-chamber, muddily moonshot, its thick air scarcely breathable for the huddled squalor that lay there on its floor!
In the garden he had felt no mortal chill. For all he knew they were still at it about their ladder under the victoria plum, re-enacting their bygone charade with the marsh-fret for their artificial backcloth. The fellow of Tottenham Fields bade only the sunflowers stand and deliver, that swaggering beau of the Bath Road danced his minuet in feather-dustered wax, downstairs at Madame Tussaud’s show.
But here was the foetid gaol-delivery itself, and how many were they as they cursed and laughed and quarrelled and gesticulated and shivered in their fevers there? But he drew back for air. He would as soon have made an inventory of the Black Museum itself, the tiny bottles with the poison still in them, the hacked razors and flattened bullets that had done the deed, as separate these from their sessions and calendars, their circuits and sentences, their remands in custody and puttings-off till the next assize.
Yet he was not old enough to remember that old gaol at Hungerton, where now the garden-city penitentiary stood. He had only heard of its grim exercise-yard, with the rusty chevaux-de-frises, and now out of the sordid anonymity individual faces were beginning to emerge, black-list faces, with family likenesses and rememberable names. A bare century had passed since the oldest in crime of these had picked ’em up on Hungerton’s rumbling treadmill in his dingy yellow with the broad-arrows, and now he too heard what Anne had heard before Patricia, his father before himself –
Tramp-tramp-tramp of feet on stone, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle along Hungerton’s grey corridors, with faces turned to the wall as the Governor passed –
Rubbings and fumblings on sash and glass, glass that still kept the associations and echoes of it, glass that no scouring would cleanse –
Glass from a whole county’s areas and sculleries and half-floors and privies, decalcomania windows opened by sluts of skivvies and the undersized lad popped in –
But now he himself had been seen at the quarter-circle with the moonlight on his face, and there was a surge and a pressing forward, and the palms of house-breakers and enterers smeared away the steaming as at every pane there appeared a face –
And somewhere among them, at large in the house, was a rogue of today, to be taken with the sticky stuff still on his fingers –
Putting his hand through the hole, he slid back the knob of the door.
But into what chaos and hurly-burly of atmospherics had he stepped? He was in his jeep again, his antenna useless, jammed in a cacophony of interference. He was driving in fog by night again, behind lights that showed the motes and particles of the opacity only. A focus of audition, this?
But an extraordinary thing was happening. Slowly the whole perimeter seemed to be revolving upon itself, the focus seeking him out, tuning itself into his ear, his intelligence, and suddenly like a belch the harsh colloquy broke through.
‘It was Flattie Jaffers pinched me, but wait till my feet hit the flagstones again!’
‘They ain’t got no right to put a man on solitary in that cell,’ and an old lag’s jeering laugh.
‘It’s only Sammy Smithers, and who takes any notice of Sammy? I seen ’im ’ang hisself twice in ’16!’
‘He ain’t going to hang hisself when I’m doing solo there. Hi, grab him, don’t let him get on that chair –’
But there was the scraping of a garden-chair on stone, a jarring of frame-work, a concussion like the dropping of a heavily-laden tray. Something hurtled past Denzil Corydon as the pane with the hole in it was shivered into a thousand fragments. At the leaping flash of his three-cell torch the prison had gone, and only for a moment had there lingered in the air a pendant shape with neck awry, in a prisoner’s parti-coloured boiler suit, hideously convulsed. Now he had eyes only for his father, standing in the inner doorway with a second flower-pot poised ready to hurl, the overturned chair, and the Woolworth hook and skein of garden raffia on the floor.
At noon of the following day they telephoned from the honey-suckled police-station that they had their roadster safely under lock and key. Judging it best to bea
t it while the going was good, the elusive one whose comings and goings had been cloaked by the flurry of ghostly gaolbirds had hurriedly let himself out by the front door again, only to walk into the constable’s waiting arms. But at five o’clock the telephone had rung again. In taking a cup of tea into the station’s single cell the constable’s tender-hearted wife had closed its door with her foot only. So the miscreant had soaked his sticky fingers in it, drunk what remained, and by the time she had returned for the empty cup had been once more at large. At any rate, that was the tale that they were giving out, and unless he had thumbed a lift they were bound to get him again within a milestone or two.
But about the rest they are freely communicative. It is the police practice, they say, to remove the exhibit intact, pane, finger-prints and all. They remembered Jaffers, and saw no reason at all why a retiring member of the force with a fancy for bulb-farming should not pick up a job lot of done-with old glass as well at a prison demolition as anywhere else. But Eustace Corydon’s white gable has no greenhouse today. It lies in five fathoms of water, a mile to seaward of the bar. Motorists still slow down to exclaim at the beauty of his garden. But let any lady from London speak of cutting anything out and framing it, and she is listened to in polite silence.
The Dead of Night Page 83