The Ministry of Fear Read online

  The stranger interrupted, laying a hand on his wrist – a nervous bony hand attached to an enormous arm. ‘You know there’s been a mistake. That cake was never meant for you.’

  ‘I won it. What do you mean?’

  ‘You weren’t meant to win it. There was a mistake in the figures.’

  ‘It’s a bit late now to worry, isn’t it?’ Rowe said. ‘We’ve eaten nearly half.’

  But the cripple took no notice of that. He said, ‘They’ve sent me here to get it back. We’ll pay in reason.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  But he knew who they were. It was comic; he could see the whole ineffective rabble coming across the grass at him: the elderly woman in the floppy hat who almost certainly painted water-colours, the intense whimsical lady who had managed the raffle, and wonderful Mrs Bellairs. He smiled and drew his hand away. ‘What are you all playing at?’ he asked. Never had a raffle, surely, been treated quite so seriously before. ‘What good is the cake to you now?’

  The other watched him with gloom. Rowe tried to raise the cloud. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s the principle of the thing. Forget it and have another cup of tea. I’ll fetch the kettle.’

  ‘You needn’t bother. I want to discuss . . .’

  ‘There’s hardly anything left to discuss, and it isn’t any bother.’

  The stranger picked at the scurf which had lodged below his finger-nail. He said, ‘There’s no more to say then?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘In that case . . .’ the stranger said: he began to listen as the next plane beat towards them. He shifted uneasily as the first guns fired, far away in East London. ‘Perhaps I will have another cup.’

  When Rowe returned the stranger was pouring out the milk – and he had cut himself another piece of cake. He was conspicuously at home with his chair drawn nearer to the gas fire. He waved his hand towards Rowe’s chair as if he were the host, and he seemed quite to have forgotten the squabble of a moment ago. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘while you were out of the room that it’s intellectuals like ourselves who are the only free men. Not bound by conventions, patriotic emotions, sentimentality . . . we haven’t what they call a stake in the country. We aren’t shareholders and it doesn’t matter to us if the company goes on the rocks. That’s quite a good image, don’t you think?’

  ‘Why do you say “we”?’

  ‘WeIl,’ the cripple said, ‘I see no sign that you are taking any active part. And of course we know why, don’t we?’ and suddenly, grossly, he winked.

  Rowe took a sip of tea: it was too hot to swallow . . . an odd flavour haunted him like something remembered, something unhappy. He took a piece of cake to drown the taste, and looking up caught the anxious speculative eyes of the cripple, fixed on him, waiting. He took another slow sip and then he remembered. Life struck back at him like a scorpion, over the shoulder. His chief feeling was astonishment and anger, that anybody should do this to him. He dropped the cup on the floor and stood up. The cripple trundled away from him like something on wheels: the huge back and the long strong arms prepared themselves . . . and then the bomb went off.

  They hadn’t heard the plane this time; destruction had come drifting quietly down on green silk cords: the walls suddenly caved in. They were not even aware of noise.

  Blast is an odd thing; it is just as likely to have the effect of an embarrassing dream as of man’s serious vengeance on man, landing you naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or on your lavatory seat to the neighbours’ gaze. Rowe’s head was singing; he felt as though he had been walking in his sleep; he was lying in a strange position, in a strange place. He got up and saw an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car turned out to be a refrigerator. He looked up and saw Charles’s Wain heeling over an arm-chair which was poised thirty feet above his head: he looked down and saw the Bay of Naples intact at his feet. He felt as though he were in a strange country without any maps to help him, trying to get his position by the stars.

  Three flares came sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree: his shadow shot out in front of him and he felt exposed, like a gaolbreaker caught in a searchlight beam. The awful thing about a raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the raid doesn’t stop. They were machine-gunning the flares: two broke with a sound like cracking plates and the third came to earth in Russell Square; the darkness returned coldly and comfortingly.

  But in the light of the flares Rowe had seen several things; he had discovered where he was – in the basement kitchen: the chair above his head was in his own room on the first floor, the front wall had gone and all the roof, and the cripple lay beside the chair, one arm swinging loosely down at him. He had dropped neatly and precisely at Rowe’s feet a piece of uncrumbled cake. A warden called from the street, ‘Is anyone hurt in there?’ and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, ‘It’s beyond a joke: it’s beyond a joke.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ the warden called down to him from the shattered street as yet another raider came up from the south-east muttering to them both like a witch in a child’s dream, ‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’

  Chapter 2

  PRIVATE INQUIRIES

  ‘There was a deep scar long after the pain had ceased.’

  The Little Duke

  1

  ORTHOTEX – the Longest Established Private Inquiry Bureau in the Metropolis – still managed to survive at the unravaged end of Chancery Lane, close to a book auctioneer’s, between a public house which in peace-time had been famous for its buffet and a legal bookshop. It was on the fourth floor, but there was no lift. On the first floor was a notary public, on the second floor the office of a monthly called Fitness and Freedom, and the third was a flat which nobody occupied now.

  Arthur Rowe pushed open a door marked Inquiries, but there was no one there. A half-eaten sausage-roll lay in a saucer beside an open telephone directory: it might, for all one knew, have lain there for weeks. It gave the office an air of sudden abandonment, like the palaces of kings in exile where the tourist is shown the magazines yet open at the page which royalty turned before fleeing years ago. Arthur Rowe waited a minute and then explored further, trying another door.

  A bald-headed man hurriedly began to put a bottle away in a filing cabinet.

  Rowe said, ‘Excuse me. There seemed to be nobody about. I was looking for Mr Rennit.’

  ‘I’m Mr Rennit.’

  ‘Somebody recommended me to come here.’

  The bald-headed man watched Rowe suspiciously with one hand on the filing cabinet. ‘Who, if I may ask?’

  ‘It was years ago. A man called Keyser.’

  ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘I hardly do myself. He wasn’t a friend of mine. I met him in a train. He told me he had been in trouble about some letters . . .’

  ‘You should have made an appointment.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rowe said. ‘Apparently you don’t want clients. I’ll say good morning.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Mr Rennit said. ‘You don’t want to lose your temper. I’m a busy man, and there’s ways of doing things. If you’ll be brief . . .’ Like a man who deals in something disreputable – pornographic books or illegal operations – he treated his customer with a kind of superior contempt, as if it was not he who wanted to sell his goods, but the other who was over-anxious to buy. He sat down at his desk and said as an afterthought, ‘Take a chair.’ He fumbled in a drawer and hastily tucked back again what he found there; at last he discovered a pad and pencil. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘when did you first notice anything wrong?’ He leant back and picked at a tooth with his pencil point, his breath whistling slightly between the uneven dentures. He looked abandoned like the other room: his collar was a little frayed and his shirt was not quite clean. But beggars, Rowe told himself, could not be choosers.

  ‘Name?’ Mr Rennit wen
t on. ‘Present address?’ He stubbed the paper fiercely, writing down the answers. At the name of a hotel he raised his head and said sombrely, ‘In your position you can’t be too careful.’

  ‘I think perhaps,’ Rowe said, ‘I’d better begin at the beginning.’

  ‘My good sir,’ Mr Rennit said, ‘you can take it from me that I know all the beginnings. I’ve been in this line of business for thirty years. Thirty years. Every client thinks he’s a unique case. He’s nothing of the kind. He’s just a repetition. All I need from you is the answer to certain questions. The rest we can manage without you. Now then – when did you notice anything wrong, wife’s coldness?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ Rowe said.

  Mr Rennit shot him a look of disgust; he felt guilty of a quibble. ‘Breach of promise, eh?’ Mr Rennit asked. ‘Have you written any letters?’

  ‘It’s not breach of promise either.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why,’ Mr Rennit asked angrily, ‘do you come to me?’ He added his tag, ‘I’m a busy man,’ but never had anyone been so palpably unemployed. There were two trays on his desk marked In and Out, but the Out tray was empty and all the In tray held was a copy of Men Only. Rowe might perhaps have left if he had known any other address, and if it had not been for that sense of pity which is more promiscuous than lust. Mr Rennit was angry because he had not been given time to set his scene, and he could so obviously not afford his anger. There was a kind of starved nobility in the self-sacrifice of his rage.

  ‘Doesn’t a detective deal with anything but divorces and breaches of promise?’

  Mr Rennit said, ‘This is a respectable business with a tradition. I’m not Sherlock Holmes. You don’t expect to find a man in my position, do you, crawling about floors with a microscope looking for blood-stains?’ He said stiffly, ‘If you are in any trouble of that kind, I advise you to go to the police.’

  ‘Listen,’ Rowe said, ‘be reasonable. You know you can do with a client just as much as I can do with you. I can pay, pay well. Be sensible and unlock that cupboard and let’s have a drink on it together. These raids are bad for the nerves. One has to have a little something . . .’

  The stiffness drained slowly out of Mr Rennit’s attitude as he looked cautiously back at Rowe. He stroked his bald head and said, ‘Perhaps you’re right. One gets rattled. I’ve never objected to stimulants as stimulants.’

  ‘Everybody needs them nowadays.’

  ‘It was bad last night at Purley. Not many bombs, but the waiting. Not that we haven’t had our share, and land-mines . . .’

  ‘The place where I live went last night.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ Mr Rennit said without interest, opening the filing cabinet and reaching for the bottle. ‘Now last week . . . at Purley . . .’ He was just like a man discussing his operations. ‘Not a hundred yards away . . .’

  ‘We both deserve a drink,’ Rowe said.

  Mr Rennit – the ice broken – suddenly became confiding. ‘I suppose I was a bit sharp. One does get rattled. War plays hell with a business like this.’ He explained. ‘The reconciliations – you wouldn’t believe human nature could be so contrary. And then, of course, the registrations have made it very difficult. People daren’t go to hotels as they used to. And you can’t prove anything from motor-cars.’

  ‘It must be difficult for you.’

  ‘It’s a case of holding out,’ Mr Rennit said, ‘keeping our backs to the wall until peace comes. Then there’ll be such a crop of divorces, breaches of promise . . .’ He contemplated the situation with uncertain optimism over the bottle. ‘You’ll excuse a tea-cup?’ He said, ‘When peace comes an old-established business like this – with connections – will be a gold-mine.’ He added gloomily, ‘Or so I tell myself.’

  Listening Rowe thought, as he often did, that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribution, though what they both boiled down to was simply Mr Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr Rennits. But of course if you believed in God – and the Devil – the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil – and God too – had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.

  ‘. . . new orders. But it will always be the same world, I hope,’ Mr Rennit was saying.

  ‘Queer things do happen in it, all the same,’ Rowe said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Mr Rennit said. ‘We’ll just fill our cups and then to business. I’m sorry I have no soda-water. Now just tell me what’s troubling you – as if I was your best friend.’

  ‘Somebody tried to kill me. It doesn’t sound important when so many of us are being killed every night – but it made me angry at the time.’

  Mr Rennit looked at him imperturbably over the rim of his cup. ‘Did you say you were not married?’

  ‘There’s no woman in it. It all began,’ Rowe said, ‘with a cake.’ He described the fête to Mr Rennit, the anxiety of all the helpers to get the cake back, the stranger’s visit . . . and then the bomb. ‘I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,’ Rowe said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the taste the tea had.’

  ‘Just imagination, probably.’

  ‘But I knew the taste. It was – hyoscine,’ he admitted reluctantly.

  ‘Was the man killed?’

  ‘They took him to hospital, but when I called today he’d been fetched away. It was only concussion and his friends wanted him back.’

  ‘The hospital would have the name and address.’

  ‘They had a name and address, but the address – I tried the London Directory – simply didn’t exist.’ He looked up across the desk at Mr Rennit expecting some sign of surprise – even in an odd world it was an odd story, but Mr Rennit said calmly, ‘Of course there are a dozen explanations.’ He stuck his fingers into his waistcoat and considered. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘it might have been a kind of confidence trick. They are always up to new dodges, those people. He might have offered to take the cake off you – for a large sum. He’d have told you something valuable was hidden in it.’

  ‘Something hidden in it?’

  ‘Plans of a Spanish treasure off the coast of Ireland. Something romantic. He’d have wanted you to give him a mark of confidence in return. Something substantial like twenty pounds while he went to the bank. Leaving you the cake, of course.’

  ‘It makes one wonder . . .’

  ‘Oh, it would have worked out,’ Mr Rennit said. It was extraordinary, his ability to reduce everything to a commonplace level. Even air-raids were only things that occurred at Purley.

  ‘Or take another possibility,’ Mr Rennit said. ‘If you are right about the tea. I don’t believe it, mind. He might have introduced himself to you with robbery in mind. Perhaps he followed you from the fête. Did you flourish your money about?’

  ‘I did give them a pound when they wanted the cake.’

  ‘A man,’ Mr Rennit said, with a note of relief, ‘who gives a pound for a cake is a man with money. Thieves don’t carry drugs as a rule, but he sounds a neurotic type.’

  ‘But the cake?’

  ‘Pure patter. He hadn’t really come for the cake.’

  ‘And your next explanation? You said there were a dozen.’

  ‘I always prefer the Straightforward,’ Mr Rennit said, running his fingers up and down the whisky bottle. ‘Perhaps there was a genuine mistake about the cake and he had come for it. Perhaps it contained some kind of a prize . . .’

  ‘And the drug was imagination again?’

  ‘It’s the straightforward explanation.’

  Mr Rennit’s calm incredulity shook Rowe. He said with resentment, ‘In all your l
ong career as a detective, have you never come across such a thing as murder – or a murderer?’

  Mr Rennit’s nose twitched over the cup. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘no. I haven’t. Life, you know, isn’t like a detective story. Murderers are rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their own.’

  ‘That’s interesting to me.’

  ‘They are very, very seldom,’ Mr Rennit said, ‘what we call gentlemen. Outside of story-books. You might say that they belong to the lower orders.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Rowe said, ‘I ought to tell you that I am a murderer myself.’

  2

  ‘Ha-ha,’ said Mr Rennit miserably.

  ‘That’s what makes me so furious,’ Rowe said. ‘That they should pick on me, me. They are such amateurs.’

  ‘You are – a professional?’ Mr Rennit asked with a watery and unhappy smile.

  Rowe said, ‘Yes, I am, if thinking of the thing for two years before you do it, dreaming about it nearly every night until at last you take the drug out from the unlocked drawer, makes you one . . . and then sitting in the dock trying to make out what the judge is really thinking, watching each one of the jury, wondering what he thinks . . . there was a woman in pince-nez who wouldn’t be separated from her umbrella, and then you go below and wait hour after hour till the jury come back and the warder tries to be encouraging, but you know if there’s any justice left on earth there can be only one verdict . . .’

  ‘Would you excuse me one moment?’ Mr Rennit said. ‘I think I heard my man come back . . .’ He emerged from behind his desk and then whisked through the door behind Rowe’s chair with surprising agility. Rowe sat with his hands held between his knees, trying to get a grip again on his brain and his tongue . . . ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips . . .’ He heard a bell tinkle in the other room and followed the sound. Mr Rennit was at the phone. He looked piteously at Rowe and then at the sausage-roll as if that were the only weapon within reach.