by Cyril Hare
“No, of course I can’t.”
“All right! Then so far as I can see the only question is, how do we deal with this thing tomorrow?”
“I think that’s a question we had better decide tomorrow,” said Stephen. “I don’t know about you, but I feel distinctly tired.”
“Same here. It’s been a long day, but a good one. I only wish . . .”
“Yes?”
“I wish,” said Martin regretfully, “there had been a bit of a row at that meeting.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Something Attempted, Something Done”
Tuesday, August 29th
“Are we all set?” said Martin.
Stephen said nothing, but nodded. His face was pale, his lips drawn in a thin, straight line. Martin, on the other hand, seemed no more than pleasantly excited. He chatted happily as they left the hotel and walked the short distance that separated them from Westgate Street.
“I think with a chap like this we can afford to do a bit of bluffing, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“I mean, in the state he’s in already, he’ll probably cave in all at once as soon as he sees that we know something.”
“Perhaps he will.”
“Do you think we could get him to write a confession? That’d floor the insurance blighters absolutely, wouldn’t it?”
“It certainly would.”
“Well, do you think he’s the sort of chap who would make a confession?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mind you, Steve, I shall leave all the talking to you. You’re a lot cleverer at that sort of thing than I am. I shall just sit around and weigh in where I think you want any support, and so forth, but by and large I shall leave all the talking to you.”
“Then for God’s sake stop talking now, and let me think in peace for a moment!” Stephen exclaimed, stung to sudden fury.
Martin apologized as amiably as ever, and contented himself with whistling loudly to himself, until Stephen was compelled to ask him to stop.
“I’m sorry,” said Martin once more. “You see, the fact is, Steve, that I’m just as worried and excited about this show as you are, really, only it takes me differently. You go all sick inside, and pale outside, and I feel frightfully pepped up and go about feeling like one of those fellows in the advertisements. You know, the chaps who take whatever it is every morning.”
“Yes, I do know. I read the papers too, as it happens.”
And from then on Stephen gave up the attempt to silence him and let him express his excitement in his own way.
At the office Stephen asked for Mr. Parsons.
“Have you got an appointment, sir?” asked the clerk who received them.
“Yes.”
After much discussion, Stephen and Martin had decided that it would be safer to telephone and make an appointment. The nominal excuse for their visit was “a matter arising out of the meeting last night,” and this had proved sufficient to procure them an interview.
They were taken through a vast hall, loud with the clatter of typewriters, into a small waiting-room, and here, after a short delay, Mr. Parsons joined them. In the light of day his face did not look nearly so ghastly as it had done under the crude glare of the lamps in the Conservative Club, and he seemed comparatively self-possessed.
“Good morning, gentlemen!” he began. “I understand that you wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” said Stephen. His face was almost as pale as Mr. Parsons’, and he seemed in some difficulty in finding words to open the conversation. “Er—I don’t think you know my name,” he went on. “My name is Dickinson—Stephen Dickinson.”
“Yes?” Mr. Parsons smiled politely. If the name conveyed anything whatever to him, he was an uncommonly good actor.
“My friend and I wanted to ask you . . .” Stephen lost track of his sentence and stopped. Out of the tail of his eye he could see Martin drawing breath to speak, and he plunged on hastily: “I think, Mr. Parsons, you know the Pendlebury Old Hall Hotel?”
Mr. Parsons raised his eyebrows.
“Pendlebury Old Hall?” he said, in a voice that was perhaps a semitone higher than was usual for him. “Why, yes, certainly. I have stayed there.”
“That’s just the point,” said Martin loudly and unexpectedly.
Mr. Parsons spun round and looked at him in a somewhat startled manner, and indeed, Martin’s abrupt incursion into the conversation was enough to make any one jump.
“Really—” he began, but Stephen did not give him time to go on.
“As my friend says,” he proceeded smoothly, “we are interested in the circumstances of your recent stay at Pendlebury. We are making inquiries—”
“One moment!” Mr. Parsons held up a hand which Stephen observed was now perfectly steady. “You tell me you are ‘making inquiries.’ Please let me ask you before you go any further, whether from that rather official phrasing I am to take it you are connected with the police?”
Martin was about to say something, but once more Stephen forestalled him.
“No,” he said. “We are making private inquiries on behalf of—of an interested party.”
Mr. Parsons smiled. There could be no doubt of it; he positively smiled!
“Then you may take it that I am not an interested party in your private inquiries into my private affairs,” he said, and while he was speaking he pressed a bell.
Almost at once, a commissionaire opened the door of the room.
“Will you show these gentlemen out, please, Robertson?” said Mr. Parsons.
“But look here!” cried Martin. “How—”
“This way, gentlemen, if you please!” said the commissionaire. He was a very large commissionaire.
* * *
If Stephen had complained of Martin’s talkativeness on the way from the Grand Hotel to Central Buildings, he would have given anything for him to have said something on the way back from Central Buildings to the Grand Hotel. As for uttering a word himself, it was out of the question. But Martin did not come to his aid. They trailed back through the loathly streets of Midchester in the silence of the utterly defeated, and though in the course of the morning some words of a sort did contrive to pass between them, it looked as if they were going to return the whole way to London without once mentioning the topic of Mr. Parsons.
It was lunch that restored them to comparative normality. Restored Martin, at all events, to the point that he was suddenly enabled to discuss the whole incident with philosophic detachment.
“Y’know, Steve,” he began abruptly, “it just shows how one can be mistaken about a chap. If ever I saw anybody who looked really beardable it was that one. And then . . .”
Stephen said nothing.
“Of course, I dare say it was a mistake trying it on in his office. My fault, I know and all that, but I didn’t fancy Chorlby Moor somehow. All the same, there aren’t any commissionaires in the suburbs.”
Stephen still remained silent, and the monologue continued:
“Not but what I dare say he’d have been a pretty tough nut anywhere. That is, if there was ever anything to the whole business. . . . It’s funny to think we never even got round to mentioning Vanning’s name to him, when you come to think of it.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Stephen muttered.
“P’raps not. Tell you what, though. If we’d bluffed a bit and said we were policemen when he asked us—I wanted to, you know—”
“I know you did. And if we had, he’d have had us both arrested straight away.”
“Good Lord, d’you think so? Well, we’re well out of that, anyhow. All the same, it’s pretty sickening to think we’ve been all this way and taken all this trouble and then got absolutely nothing to show for it. . . .”
His voice trailed away. Clearly there was no more to be said.
To add to their miseries, when about twenty miles short of London the car choked, spluttered, recovered itself, splutte
red again, and finally stopped. Stephen, who knew nothing whatever about the insides of motor-cars, sat patiently inside while Martin did mysterious things to the engine with an adjustable spanner. It was quite a simple job, he explained, simply the old carburettor playing up again. He wouldn’t be half a jiffy. He knew the old bus’s tricks backwards.
In the end it took him nearly an hour and a half, and thereafter for the rest of the way their speed was reduced to a precarious fifteen miles an hour. It seemed to be the last touch necessary to make their failure complete. They had aimed at reaching home in time for tea, but it was nearly seven before they entered Hampstead High Street. Just before the turning to Plane Street, Martin pulled up with a jerk. Stephen, who had been dozing, opened his eyes and said irritably:
“What’s the matter now?”
“Look!” said Martin, and pointed across the street.
Opposite, some newspaper-sellers had their pitch. It was a day of little news, as was evidenced by the fact that each placard bore a totally different legend. The first that Stephen noticed ran:
LIBYA TROOP
MOVEMENT
RUMOURS DENIED
Next to it was:
TWO GASSED
IN
SWANAGE
LOVE-NEST
Then a little farther down the street, in huge letters of black on yellow, he read:
MIDLANDS
GAS MANAGER
FOUND DEAD
Before Stephen had properly taken it in, Martin was out of the car and dodging among the omnibuses across the road.
He was back, waving a paper, long before the shops and houses had ceased to be a confused blur before Stephen’s eyes. He climbed into the car, his face pink with excitement, threw the paper across to Stephen, shut the door, and engaged the gear.
“It’s him all right,” he said in a hushed voice, as if he were speaking in the very presence of the dead.
Stephen found voice to say: “Did he use Medinal, by any chance?”
“No. Shot himself. In the office.”
“Oh!”
Shortly before they reached Mrs. Dickinson’s door, Martin, looking straight in front of him, murmured, “Just as well we didn’t give our names at the office, Steve.”
“Yes.”
“Funny I was complaining just now that we hadn’t done anything on the trip.”
“M’m.”
At the house, Stephen got out and Martin remained in the car.
“Think I’ll go straight home and turn in early,” he said, apparently to the mascot on the radiator cap. “Feel a bit tired. Will you explain to Annie?”
“Right,” said Stephen, looking at his boots. “Good night. Oh, and thanks for driving me up and all that.”
“That’s all right,” answered Martin without shifting his gaze. “Good night.”
In the hall, Stephen looked at the newspaper for the first time. He was still there when his mother came out of the drawing-room to greet him.
“Well, Stephen, what sort of day have you had?” she asked him.
He did not answer. He was reading:
“The deceased leaves a wife and three children. Interviewed today in the pretty drawing-room of her Chorlby Moor home, Mrs. Parsons told our representative . . .”
“What’s the matter, Stephen? You look quite pale.”
“Oh, I’m all right, Mother. A bit tired, that’s all. It’s been rather an exhausting day. Do you think there’s any brandy in the house?”
Chapter Sixteen
Parbury Gardens
Tuesday, August 29th
On the second day of the absence of her brother and fiancé at Midchester, Anne could stand inaction no longer. Waiting for the men to come in was all very well, but waiting prolonged over two days was too much of a good thing, particularly when the strain of waiting was aggravated by the presence of an obstinate something at the back of her mind, which refused to be exorcised. At first that something had seemed like a tiny grain of solid matter lodged somewhere in the cogs of a well-oiled machine, giving no evidence of its existence except now and then, when there would be a faint jar in the process of her thought. She could ignore it by turning her thoughts elsewhere, by letting that part of the machine lie idle. But now it had taken on a different aspect. She pictured it no longer as an inert obstruction in her smoothly working brain, but as a living, malignant growth, sending out its ramifications in every direction, proliferating, breaking down the resistances she had built against it. . . .
She went out on the Heath and walked about until she was tired. For the first time, she envied all the people who had dogs with them—quarrelsome, excitable dogs, disobedient, runaway dogs, dogs that were embarrassingly friendly with the dogs of other people, dogs that were incessantly requiring balls or sticks to be thrown for them—each one of them something that had to be called, to be whistled to, cursed, put on the lead, dragged away from somebody or something, or at least continually watched over and thought about. For the first and only time she yearned for a Scottie, six months old, guaranteed through distemper. There was, as Martin had said, something about a dog you didn’t get anywhere else.
After lunch, her restlessness persisted. She went out again, and, too tired for any more walking, got on a bus. Any bus, she told herself, would have done. Since the particular one she was on had happened to come past, there was, after all, no reason why she should have taken it. But the fact remained that she had let two go by before she finally mounted this one.
The bus rattled her down the hill, down into the sticky heat of London. She bought a sixpenny ticket—there was no point in not having a long outing while she was about it. She might have tea somewhere, or go to a flick, or look up Ruth Downing, only she would be sure to be still away. And when the bus drew up at the fare stage opposite the corner of Parbury Gardens, she told herself that she was genuinely surprised to find herself there.
She alighted and crossed the road. After all, why not? There was nothing in the least disloyal in what she was doing. She was simply checking up. It was an obvious precaution. Martin would quite understand. In fact, she meant to tell him all about it when she got home. He would probably be rather amused. None the less, though she told herself all this, she felt her knees tremble ever so slightly as she walked up to the ugly brick block of flats.
What was so particularly absurd, as she admitted in her own mind, was that she had not really any idea what she expected to find. But this circumstance did not make her relief any the less genuine when, opposite number 15, she found in the narrow vestibule the name of Mrs. Elizabeth Peabody, precisely as Martin had said. With a lighter heart and a growing sense that she had been making herself ridiculous, she walked on to No. 34. There, sure enough, was Mr. T. P. M. Jones, and the sensation of reassurance at once deepened. She walked out into the sunlight, feeling that it was hardly worth while attempting to verify the fact that Mrs. Peabody was blind, or that Mr. Jones wore a beard.
Instead of walking away at once, however, she took a turn round the square of which Parbury Gardens formed one side. Under the plane-trees shading the little green patch in the middle of the square was a perambulator. In the perambulator, presumably was a baby, and beside it a cross-eyed nurse squatted on a stool and knitted. Anne paused in her walk and watched them vacantly. The baby belonged to one of the flats, she mused. Surprising that they hadn’t sent it to the seaside at this time of the year. Perhaps they couldn’t afford to. Curious, you’d have thought they were well enough off, though—it looked a fairly expensive kind of pram. Hire purchase, very likely. . . . All the same, if it was mine, I’d have found a way to . . . But that nurse! Surely it can’t be good for a child to be looked after by any one with a squint as bad as that? I should be terrified of the baby picking it up. Of course, very likely the real nurse is on holiday and this one is only a temporary. . . .
She dragged herself away and resumed her walk. This won’t do, my girl, she said to herself. You’re a deal too scatter-brained, that’
s what’s the matter with you. You didn’t come down here to moon over babies but to investigate something. Think, girl, think! And I’m going to keep you walking round this blasted square until you’ve something to show for it!
Fifteen, Parbury Gardens, Anne repeated to herself as her feet dragged slowly along the pavement. Fifteen, Parbury Gardens. That was the address the Joneses gave at the hotel, and the Joneses weren’t Joneses at all, but a couple out on the loose. So Martin said. Several times. And when you’re a couple out on the loose, you don’t put your real name and address in the book. Martin says so, and Martin knows. I suppose if I had spent the night at Bentby with Martin we’d have put . . . I wonder what sort of name and address we’d have put?
Her incorrigible mind wandered away into other paths for a moment until conscience, striding after, pulled it back with a jerk. You’re as bad as those dogs on the Heath, conscience told mind severely. Meekly, mind took up the trail again, as Anne completed her first circuit of the square.
But if you have to put down a sham address on the spur of the moment, what you put down has probably some association with you. Martin said so. No, he didn’t. I said so, and Martin just looked glum and pretended to be stupid, because he knew all about the technique of sham addresses. But he didn’t contradict, anyway. If you invented an address that didn’t exist, it might be different, though even then there would probably be some unconscious—subconscious? I never can remember the difference—some association, anyhow, which directed your mind in making that particular invention. But where you chose a real address, one that was sham only in the sense that it wasn’t yours, the odds were that you had some reason for your choice.
And that’s as far as I got three days ago, talking to Martin. And now that I am in Parbury Gardens, where do we go from here? Fifteen, Parbury Gardens means something. It’s a kind of code which we haven’t got the key to. And the key was in the mind of the Joneses, or one of them, when they wrote down those words in the book at Pendlebury Old Hall. Wait a bit. Try and picture them standing there, with the book open in front of them, and the reception clerk staring at them in that vacant superior way they always do. . . . Damn difficult to picture anyone when you don’t know what their faces are like. But there is a picture all the same, an impression anyway. Now why?